Diplomacy's sometimes silver linings

National Post, 14 March 2022

It is not only Caesar’s wife who should be above suspicion, but Caesar’s ambassadors, too

At what point does an eminent person’s credibility become expendable?

Consider Christopher Westdal, a former Canadian ambassador to Russia who was, until very recently, happy to be Ottawa’s chief apologist for Vladimir Putin.

Westdal resigned last week as chairman of the board of Silver Bear, a Russian mining company. He completed his term as ambassador in 2006, and joined Silver Bear in 2007. He reportedly earned $100,000 a year in cash and stock compensation.

Aside from whatever mining expertise he offered to Silver Bear, the career diplomat certainly offered fevered laudations for Putin, happy to sing his praises to anyone, including House of Commons committees.

“I found Vladimir Putin engaging, courteous, articulate, highly intelligent, very well briefed, with a prodigious memory — a patriot and a realist, pragmatic above all,” Westdal gushed in 2015. That was, note, after Putin’s invasion, occupation and annexation of Crimea.

Westdal also served as ambassador to Ukraine from 1996 to 1998.

“Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine breaks my heart, the part of it I left in Kyiv when I finished my term as ambassador,” Westdal now says.

His heart was apparently less breakable after Putin’s 2014 invasions of Crimea and Donbas. It has been estimated that some 14,000 Ukrainians have died in conflicts in Donbas since that time.

Putin began massing his troops again last year. The “brutal invasion” began on Feb. 24. Westdal’s heart was not immediately broken. That took a few days. He resigned on Feb. 28.

“I was wrong. I am sorry. I apologize,” Westdal said in a statement to the National Post. “Would that I’d seen the light and done it sooner.”

The light was plenty bright enough for a long time. I was in Kyiv in 2015 and street vendors there had no illusion about Putin’s intentions or character. They were eager to share that they found Putin neither “engaging” nor “courteous.” Perhaps Westdal never talked to such people.

But surely on his trips to Russia for Silver Bear he might have noticed nearly a decade’s worth of anti-Ukraine propaganda in Russia’s state-controlled media? Might his ears not have twigged to denunciations of Ukrainians as Nazis? Not exactly a term of endearment for one who left his heart in Kyiv.

No, the light was bright enough. Westdal chose not to see it.

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