I would rather fight terrorists than allow a government the power to suspend rights and act as a dictator. The second is far more dangerous. Repeal all such emergency powers acts and their like!
Trudeau gave a speech today affirming his support for human rights and the right of people to choose their own future — in Ukraine.
Apparently this won’t apply here though.
My view in general — if a majority of people in those two enclaves want to be part of Russia, then why not peacefully redraw the borders so that becomes de jure as well as de facto, with guarantees of no further interference or incursions. Some would say this rewards Putin for aggression but I would have supported that before Russian troops entered those regions. The borders between Ukraine and Russia were changed several times in the Soviet era when it really didn’t matter that much given the centralized form of government in the USSR, and in fact some parts of Ukraine as it existed in 1992 at full independence were Russian for long periods of time, including Crimea (about which the same acceptance of tranferred sovereignty since 2014 should apply).
It certainly seems like a dumb reason for an international crisis that Russians are not allowed to live in Russia. It’s not like they were planted there as with the Baltic states to influence sovereignty, they were removed from Russia during the course of the Soviet Union when Ukraine was a powerful component and supplied leadership on several occasions.