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Asked about Chomiak last week, Freeland batted away the question, saying “I don’t think it’s a secret. American officials have publicly said, and even Angela Merkel has publicly said, that there were efforts on the Russian side to destabilize Western democracies, and I think it shouldn’t come as a surprise if these same efforts were used against Canada.”

The awkward dodge elicited a spectrum of responses from the Canadian media. “So much for Russian disinformation,” David Pugliese wrote for the Ottawa Citizen after reviewing the evidence. “No coherent allotment of blame and absolution is possible,” Paul Wells argued in the Toronto Star, adding that the survival history of Freeland’s family did not detract from her “important work” to prevent history from repeating itself.

The underlying issue, however, is more fundamental than the nature of Russian propaganda (which can only be effective if it’s grounded, to some extent, in truth) or the moral murk of the terrain Timothy Snyder, a historian sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause, called the Bloodlands. For the Kremlin — and for many Russians — the current conflict with Ukraine is, in a way, an extension of that war. It’s more than a propaganda argument: Russia’s claim of a moral right to interfere depends on this interpretation.

Any sign of historic betrayal is fair game. Long before Freeland’s grandfather got their attention, pro-Russian sites alleged that the father of Oleksandr Turchynov, Ukraine’s acting president after the 2014 “Revolution of Dignity,” served as a private in a German army unit. Stories of the annual torchlit marches in Kiev to commemorate Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who collaborated with the Nazis for a period, play big in the Russian press. So do stories featuring the Azov Regiment of the Ukrainian National Guard, staffed with ultranationalists and using a Nazi symbol on its emblem. Like Poland, Russia has noted a Ukrainian law bestowing hero status on the 1940s nationalist organizations that worked closely with the Nazis and are known to have unleashed genocide on Poles and Jews.