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Was Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather a Nazi collaborator?

If so, does that undercut her moral authority as one of Canada’s most senior politicians?

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Or are we all being played and manipulated by Russia’s propaganda machine?

Those seem like crazy questions. But Freeland is under a microscope in the wake of efforts by Russian-linked bloggers to tie her to her deceased grandfather’s past as the editor of a Ukrainian nationalist newspaper, published in German-occupied Poland during the Second World War.

Freeland initially dismissed the reports as Russian propaganda. But this week, the Alberta-born minister was under new scrutiny with Canadian papers picking up the story and commentators complaining she’d been less than forthcoming about her family’s troubled past.

Mykhailo Khomiak, or Michael Chomiak, to use his Anglicized name, was Freeland’s grandfather and spent his post-war years in Alberta. Before the war, he was a young journalist in Lviv. Today, it’s a city in western Ukraine. But in the 1920s, it was a part of Poland. Chomiak was a reporter for a Ukrainian-language Lviv newspaper called Dilo, or Deed.