WATCH ABOVE: Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird discusses Canada’s next moves in the Russia-Ukraine battle.
Canada will be looking at ways to increase pressure on Russia, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said from the Netherlands after returning from Ukraine with Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Those ways could include further sanctions or even giving Russia the boot from the G8, Baird said in an interview on The West Block with Tom Clark.
“I think even at last year’s G8, the prime minister began to call it the ‘G7 plus one’ because Russia is just so fundamentally not aligned, particularly on the issues of values, human rights and respect for liberal democracy,” he said from The Hague. “Obviously this will be one of the central issues that the G7 leaders discuss tomorrow, so let’s let them have that conversation first.”
READ MORE: Harper to urge G7 colleagues for tougher action against Putin
Stephen Harper paid a visit to Ukraine on Saturday, becoming the first G7 leader to witness the devastation in Kyiv as he took in the battle-scarred city square at the heart of the country’s pro-democracy uprising last month.
The prime minister, who called for a “complete reversal” of Russia’s annexation of Crimea during his six hours in Kyiv, laid a large bouquet of red carnations along a stone wall near Independence Square.
“We obviously want to protect two things,” Baird said Sunday. “One: Ukraine democracy. And two: their sovereignty and their territorial integrity. Simply put, it’s unacceptable in this century for the Kremlin to try to redraw the boundaries of Europe.”
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