Canada’s U.N. ambassador: ‘It's an attack on the global order’

OTTAWA, Ont. — Canada’s man at the United Nations, Bob Rae, is a diplomat who is calling it like he sees it these days.

“We know [the Russians] are lying because their lips are moving,” he recently told a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interviewer.

Rae, a former social democrat premier of Ontario who later served as interim leader of the federal Liberal Party, brings a politician's instincts to his perch in New York City. He has the trust of the Prime Minister's Office and a wide berth to speak his mind extemporaneously. One of his former colleagues at the U.N., Louise Blais, tells POLITICO he's the right man for the job at the right time as global leaders reckon with Russia's war on Ukraine.

POLITICO spoke with Rae on Tuesday, just after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed a joint session of Canada's Parliament. The ambassador reflected on Ukraine's desperate need for more military assistance, where the conversations that matter most are happening, and what the U.N. can do about it.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Zelenskyy repeated a call for a no-fly zone over Ukraine's skies. That's still a no-go from Canada and its allies. What did you make of his request?

The important thing is to understand the objective. The objective that President Zelenskyy is asking for is to give all the assistance we can to the people of Ukraine, and make sure that assistance is effective, and is able to respond to the nature of Russian aggression. That's a critical question that will be asked not only by defense ministers, but by the leaders of every country in the alliance that's committed to supporting Ukraine.

We all just have to appreciate the fact that nobody wants to see [Russian President Vladimir] Putin succeed. The aggression that's been carried out by Putin's government is a breach of every aspect of international law, every aspect of the international order. It can't be allowed to stand.

We all have to understand that our responses to previous acts of aggression by President Putin haven't been strong enough. What we do now has to be strong enough. The survival of democracy in Ukraine is at stake.

Zelenskyy has made the request for a no-fly zone before. At what point do Canada and its allies have to offer assistance that could risk escalating the war?

There is an escalation that's happening. The escalation is happening because of Russia. We need to understand that.

I'm sure there are lots of military experts who are advising governments in different places, in NATO and everywhere else, saying, "Well, you could do this, you could do that." We need to keep on pushing ourselves to examine every option and to look at every possibility in order to allow us to make Vladimir Putin stop doing what he's doing, and make his government stop doing what it's doing.

I spoke with Louise Blais, a retired diplomat who worked with you at Canada's U.N. mission, about the U.N.'s options. She's advocating for a protective force. What do you think of that idea?

Louise's analysis is right in the sense that the U.N. has in the past used article 51 of the Charter, which is the section of the Charter that deals with the issue of self-defense.

Luckily, as you may know, I carry the Charter with me at all times. So I have it right here in front of me. What she's asking us to look at is the principle that nothing in the Charter impairs the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense, if an armed attack occurred against a member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.

The U.N. is not powerless to respond if it chooses to. That is actually how the United Nations ended up being at war over Korea. The Korean War was fought between the United Nations and the North Koreans and China. That took place despite the Soviet Union having a veto at the United Nations.

It's really a matter of political will. It's not a matter of saying, "Can the U.N. find a way to do this?" The answer is “Yes, the U.N. can.” Do members of the United Nations want to do this? That's a separate question.

That's something which is right now challenging for the members of the United Nations to agree on, just as it's challenging for members of NATO to agree on what its further steps will be — other than just repeating mantras about not attacking NATO.

So far, the responses have been to supply the military supplies that we can to Ukraine, to impose the sanctions that we can on Russia, and to give every assistance that we can to the humanitarian and the legal issues, the accountability and impunity issues that are at stake.

On a continual basis, we need to assess what other options are there. No one should be shocked or surprised when President Zelenskyy says, "Hurry up, the house is burning. Please come and help me." I don't think we should be limited by one particular method of our resolve to force Russia to withdraw its troops and to reach a reasonable settlement with Ukraine.

Is a U.N. protective force an active conversation among your colleagues?

I wouldn't say so. No. What's happening at the moment is that the conversation is very much happening within NATO, and within countries that are close to NATO, like Sweden and Finland, about what more might be done.

Green MP Elizabeth May implored the federal government to look creatively for options that respond to President Zelenskyy's plea for more assistance. What conversations are happening behind the scenes at the U.N. that might be categorized as creative thinking?

Well, if I was to tell you what they are, they would no longer be private conversations. I can assure you that there are lots of private conversations. There are lots of conversations underway to try to figure out what more can be done. The focus of a lot of those conversations at the moment are among like-minded countries that are based at NATO in Brussels.

It's important to stress that the Suez Crisis was one where a major power, the United States, was prepared to break publicly with the Brits and the French and the Israelis who conducted their raid on the canal. Canada's role in that issue was to again stress that there had to be a creative solution that would allow people to back down from where they are, and get to a better place. Suez was resolved relatively quickly, because of the decisive move that the U.S. made in 1956.

Now we have a U.N. of 193 countries, where pretty much the parameters of the discussion are being set by the United States and its allies, against Russia and in support of Ukraine. This is a different moment. But that doesn't mean that the requests that Elizabeth [May] has made, that people really put their thinking caps on in terms of how it could be done, or what would be involved in doing it, shouldn't happen. In my view, it has to continue to happen. We all have to be thinking as creatively as we can about what needs to happen.

But we also need to understand that in order for it to happen, it has to be a decision that's made by member states working in the U.N., in NATO, in other places. It's not as if NATO and the U.N. are separate entities that are floating around there that have an independent capacity to make a decision. They don't. NATO requires a decision that's being made by members of NATO and like-minded allies. The same is true for the United Nations. It would require a coalition of the willing and of the like-minded to take the extra step. And the same partners who would be involved in finding the solution for NATO would be involved in finding the solution for the U.N.

Are you satisfied with the amount of discourse at the U.N. in response to the crisis?

There's always lots of discourse at the U.N. The question is: Is the discourse related to reality? And is it related to the ability to take action?

That's a sharper version of my question.

I think the secretary-general gave a very good statement yesterday. He spoke from the heart. He spoke very directly to the nature of the crisis. And he spoke very directly to an additional element of the crisis I don't think is sufficiently understood.

Ukraine is an incredibly important producer of food, and is an incredibly important participant in the global effort to fight starvation and hunger around the world. What is happening now is cutting off that lifeline. Agricultural production is being severely impacted in Ukraine, and that will have a major impact on our ability, collectively, to fight starvation and insecurity around the world.

What Russia is doing is not just an attack on Ukraine, it's an attack on the global order. And the global order includes how we treat humanitarian issues, including the provision of food, ability of countries to buy food, and to share food.

We're going to see the impact in terms of prices. We're also going to see the impact in terms of availability of food. And it's going to put huge pressure on the international system. The irony is that the Russian Federation is now presenting to the Security Council a motion on the provision of humanitarian aid, which to me is so risible as to be completely ridiculous. It reminds me of the old joke about the kid who kills his parents, and then goes to court and says you gotta take care of me because I'm an orphan.

The one country that is singularly responsible for the humanitarian crisis is Russia. And they don't get they don't get to set the conditions for humanitarian assistance. They're causing the crisis. They're not gonna solve it.

What are you watching for next as the U.N. tackles the crisis in Ukraine?

There are a number of initiatives that will follow if the U.N. Security Council fails, once again, to reach a consensus on an important resolution, which I suspect it will. That would have to do with the provision of humanitarian assistance. That will then come back to the General Assembly, and the General Assembly will have to deal with that. So that's our first issue.

I'm flying to the Hague at the end of the week to attend some meetings of the governance group of the assembly of states parties of the International Criminal Court.

I'm anticipating there will be other surprise events around what more needs to be done to deal with the consequences of Russia's behavior that are going to be quite consequential.

The humanitarian cost of what is happening will be much, much greater than people recognize. The additional impact of this conflict on the global system, coupled with Covid, and coupled with climate change, will be far more drastic than I think people realize. We're in what I would call the impulsive reaction to the crisis at the moment, but what the longer term consequences, the deeper consequences to the global system, I think will become clear to people in the next few months and weeks.

We need to understand this is a war. We don't want to see it broadened or widened. We understand that it is something that is being deeply felt by the people of Ukraine at the moment. But it's having secondary consequences for many, many other countries. And all of those consequences are not entirely predictable.