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KYIV — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his nine-year-old son, Xavier, making his public debut overseas, spent much of Monday visiting memorials of Stalin’s starvation of Ukraine in the 1930s, Nazi atrocities against Ukrainians during the Second World War and the slaughter in 1941 of 33,770 Jews by Hitler’s forces at Babi Yar.

But such reminders melded with talk about the country’s current war with Russia, which was triggered by Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its subsequent direct and indirect military actions in eastern Ukraine.

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“Canada will always stand by Ukraine,” Trudeau told Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko after the two leaders signed a free-trade agreement in an opulent, Soviet-era hall in the presidential palace.

While trade was the ostensible reason for their meeting and numerous compliments were exchanged regarding the more than 1.2 million Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, Ukraine’s David and Goliath struggle with the Kremlin over eastern Ukraine loomed over everything.