Canada sanctions more than 200 loyal to Russia in Ukraine’s east

Canada has imposed sanctions on more than 200 people who are loyal to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.

Canada has imposed sanctions on more than 200 people who are loyal to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine‘s eastern Donbas region.

Global Affairs Canada says the new measures target 11 senior officials and 192 other members of the People’s Councils of the self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk for supporting Putin’s attack on the area.

Russian forces have been backing separatist rebels in the Donbas area for eight years following Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

That Russian-backed separatist insurgency claimed 14,000 lives before the Feb. 24 start of Putin’s full-scale war to take over the country, an attack that has faltered in the face of a determined Ukrainian resistance backed with Western weaponry.

Putin has now refocused his war on Ukraine’s mainly Russian-speaking eastern region, pulling back from an unsuccessful attempt to take the capital Kyiv and drive out the government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The Canadian sanctions are focused on the renewed Russian attempt to annex areas of the Donbas by targeting people attempting to support the next phase of the two-month-old Russian war on Ukraine.

“Canada will not stand idly by and watch President Putin and his accomplices attempt to redraw the borders of Ukraine with impunity. International law must be respected,” Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly said in a statement.

“Canada is using every tool at its disposal to ensure that the rules-based international order is upheld and that those complicit in violations of international law answer for their crimes.”