Ukraine has faced a long and difficult path to the European Union. Since 2014, the year of the EuroMaidan Revolution, the country has made massive reforms across sectors, improving its rule of law, state capacity, and democratic governance to court the European community. In recent years, geopolitics has hastened the process: When Ukraine applied for EU membership on the fourth day of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, candidate status was quickly granted. Brussels conditioned its offer to open negotiations on a set of reforms, which Ukraine managed to satisfy even while at war. In late 2023, the European Council greenlit accession talks, which began in June 2024. But the end of the journey remains out of sight. While negotiations are proceeding and both parties seem optimistic, one obstacle looms above all others: Ukraine’s reputation for rampant corruption.

Along with Stan Kutcher, a psychiatrist, professor at Dalhousie University, and current Independent Senator for Nova Scotia, as well as Ian Garner, an Assistant Professor at the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw, Poland, Professor Popova claims that Canadians feel. The authors further claim how Anastasia Trofimova’s contentious film, Russians At War, suggests that Ukraine was at fault for the war; through doing so subtly, the authors further argue how this film is a classic example of how Russian disinformation enters civil discourse. Uncertainty around its release is symptomatic of the murky world of Russian propaganda spreading in the West — and how Canadians especially remain unaware of its occurrence.

Russians At War, a documentary by Russian-Canadian director Anastasia Trofimova, has triggered a lively debate about art, propaganda, freedom of expression and Russian intelligence operations abroad. Trofimova has claimed she spent several months filming Russian forces in occupied Ukraine without official permission to show a hitherto hidden side of the war. The film’s creators and some reviewers have argued that this is a daring and heart-wrenching anti-war film about Russian soldiers who fight through a quasi-apocalyptic landscape destroyed by persons unknown, and perish without ever knowing what they are fighting for. These ordinary men fall victim to a dehumanizing war that resulted — in the director’s own words — from a “failure of diplomacy.”