I’m in Ontario and this past week I got a couple of messages from family and friends in southern Ontario that their sons/nephews/friends who are in the army are going to be sent to either Poland or Ukraine in the next few months.
It’s really upset myself and my family because I have relatives who were war veterans who either died or were traumatized by war (in WWII and WWI). Most of my family and circle of friends all agree … no one in Canada should be sent to any war / conflict / fight / aggression / whatever you want to call it in Europe.
One of them said that they were going to be deployed to Poland but then that recently got changed to Ukraine. The messages about this one soldier came from a mother who is a friend of mine. She said that her son told her that it would be a combat role for him.
I am not certain if the young son is making up stories for his mother (as they have a difficult relationship). I’m partly wondering if the young guy is doing some strange path of going to Ukraine just to fight in whatever capacity (whether as a Canadian soldier or just a plain mercenary) just because he wants to.
So after hearing two separate families suggesting that they thought their relative was going to be sent to Poland or Ukraine in the next few months … is Canada sending … or going to send troops to Poland or Ukraine? Or is this something that their families have to worry about because some dumb kid is wanting to join a war on his own?
Do you have a source of that information? … I haven’t been able to find any news story, announcement about it.
There is one TStar article quoting an army official saying that it is possible
https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/under-the-right-conditions-canada-open-to-sending-noncombat-troops-to-ukraine-defence-minister-bill/article_eec6806c-d71d-11ee-91fb-ab92d0af803e.html
“Noncombat.” Its a training mission.
We’ve been running training missions with the Ukrainians since before the war started. The only question is whether to actually run those missions in Ukraine, or in a third party country like Poland or the UK. The army and the government are constantly assessing that based on the current state of the war. Running missions in Ukraine reduces the amount of time that Ukrainian soldiers have to spend away from the fighting (as well as imposing some logistical difficulties) but it also exposes our soldiers to somewhat more risk if the battle lines move suddenly, so they’re weighing those factors against each other.