Good morning. The Globe’s Mark MacKinnon provides a view from Ukraine’s shifting front lines, and we cover the latest on the apparent Donald Trump assassination attempt. But first:
Today’s headlines
- The Liberals lose a Montreal riding to the Bloc, while the NDP hold on to a Winnipeg stronghold
- Ottawa raises the price cap on insured mortgages to $1.5-million and allows first-time home buyers to take out a 30-year mortgage on all types of homes
- Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue won’t name the parliamentarians allegedly collaborating with foreign powers
Nina Shustova, 80, is without water and electricity in Pokrovsk.Olga Ivashchenko/The Globe and Mail
The Globe in Ukraine
The war closes in
It’s still unclear what motivated suspected gunman Ryan Wesley Routh to hide in the bushes with an AK-47 assault rifle while Donald Trump played golf 400 yards away. But over the past two years, in social-media posts and interviews with media outlets, Routh often declared his desire to “help” Ukraine in its war against Russia. He travelled there in 2022 to try to join the military and recruit foreign volunteers – efforts that were frequently rebuffed – and posted on X that he was willing to “fight and die” for Ukraine.
You can read more about Routh, as well as the latest in the investigation, further down in this newsletter. But The Globe’s foreign correspondent Mark MacKinnon wonders if the apparent assassination attempt could deepen Trump’s opposition to U.S. military aid for Ukraine, which is essential to the country’s ability to fend off Russia’s invasion.
MacKinnon spent the last two weeks reporting from Ukraine, including along the northeastern border in Sumy, where the military launched a risky incursion into Russia, and down in the Donbas region, where people are bracing for their darkest winter yet. He spoke with me about what life looks like on the front lines and Ukrainians’ fears about another potential Trump presidency.
More than a month after Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk, Russian resistance is stiffening. What does that meant for the people of Sumy?
The Sumy border area was once one of the quieter frontiers between Russia and Ukraine, but since the incursion, Russia has really punished the region. When we drove from the city of Sumy toward the border, the fields on both sides of the highway were in flames. On our left, someone had set a fire to try to expose any Russian landmines, while the other side had been hit by artillery. The small villages along that road were just destroyed by the battles that had unfolded. The city of Sumy used to be a shelter for people, because it was reasonably safe, but now it’s a place they don’t want to be in at nighttime. We stayed in a little guest house in the middle of nowhere in the countryside.
How has the fighting affected civilians trying to get across the border?
There are large numbers of Ukrainian citizens who, before the war, had gone to Russia to work or visit family. If they – or people in the occupied areas of Crimea or the Donbas region – wanted to get out, one of the few ways was through the Sudzha border crossing into Ukraine. Now the crossing is destroyed, so the only option is to flee through Belarus. That’s complicated, because to enter Belarus from Russia, you need a Russian passport. There’s a lot of pressure on Ukrainians living in occupied areas to have them – if you want to get a mobile phone card, for example, you have to show up to the store with your Russian passport – and some people have refused to do that on patriotic principle. Now they’re trapped. There’s one checkpoint on the Belarus-Ukraine border that operates the way Sudzha used to, but it’s not very busy.
Ukrainians fleeing the war further south used to be evacuated to Pokrovsk, a key rail and highway hub near the eastern front. Now its residents are being told to go. But go where? And who’s staying behind?
It is a journey into the unknown for a lot of people. It’s too dangerous to be put on a train from Pokrovsk, so they’re bussed to a nearby town, and I’m told the destination are these apartment blocks in western cities of Ukraine. As of a few days ago, there are about 20,000 people still in Pokrovsk, from an initial population of 60,000. They tend to fall into two groups. One is men who sent their families away but are staying to mine every last bit of coal before the Russians arrive and the fighting gets too intense. And then there are a lot of elderly residents who simply can’t fathom leaving. They’re a mix of people who don’t believe they’d have a good future in Western Ukraine or Europe, and people who have pro-Russian sympathies and aren’t necessarily bothered by the idea they’d be under Moscow’s rule.
Col. Vadym Mysnyk looks over the Sudzha border crossing between Ukraine and Russia.Olga Ivashchenko/The Globe and Mail
What’s the state of Pokrovsk right now?
If you stand on the roof of an apartment block, as I did, you can see the fighting happening in what’s basically the suburbs. The infrastructure in Pokrovsk is absolutely devastated. Electricity has been out since close to the start of the month; water has been out for several days. There’s a curfew between 3 p.m. and 11 a.m., so people have four hours to come out, get water, try to find some food and get back home. When I was there, elderly residents, older women in particular, were gathering outside a water pump set up by the International Organization for Migration – just waiting their turn with empty plastic jugs, trying to fill 10, 15, 20 litres, as much as they could carry. And while we were at that pump, a fighter jet flew by at an extremely high speed and very low altitude, sending us all scrambling for cover.
Ukraine is in the middle of a pretty crucial recruitment drive. How’s that going, and how’s morale?
You see signs around saying “defend your country,” but you also see people getting grabbed on the streets and asked for documents that show they’re exempt from serving – and if they don’t have those documents, they get assigned to a unit. So Ukraine is definitely trying to get more troops, but the impact hasn’t been felt yet on the front lines. The units are the same units that have been fighting since the start of the war. And in interviews on this trip, we saw a real bitterness in those soldiers, who are wondering when it’s going to be someone else’s turn. You go to Kyiv and Lviv in Western Ukraine, and you do see a lot of seemingly fighting-age men enjoying life close to normal.
In a recent poll, 70 per cent of Ukrainians said they can suffer as long as needed to succeed in this war. But 935 days in, what might success look like?
Nobody will say out loud right now that Ukraine is willing to give up territory in exchange for peace, and Ukrainian politicians will insist that success means Russia leaving every bit of land it’s occupying, including Crimea. Is there a formula in between, where it leaves some of the occupied territories and has referendums at some future date? Who monitors those referendums? I’m sure diplomats are trying to come up with a formula for discussion, but the incentive for Vladimir Putin to make peace simply doesn’t exist.
Ukranians are very nervous about what happens if Donald Trump returns to the White House. His running mate, JD Vance, said their plan would allow Russia to keep the land it has – roughly 20 per cent of Ukraine – and promises Ukraine will never join NATO. I’m sure Putin would very much like that deal. Could Ukraine be forced to make peace under Trump? That’s one of the big questions, and perhaps why someone who wanted to be affiliated with the fight to defend Ukraine apparently pointed a rifle in Trump’s direction this weekend.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Donald Trump
12 hours spent hiding in the bushes
A van takes Routh from the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach, Florida.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
More details have emerged about Ryan Wesley Routh, the suspected gunman in the apparent Donald Trump assassination attempt, who was charged in a Florida federal court yesterday with two firearms counts. Routh already had several felony convictions, and two decades ago, he barricaded himself in a North Carolina building with a fully automatic machine gun. Last year, he self-published a rambling e-book called Ukraine’s Unwinnable War, which included an offhand mention of Trump’s potential assassination. And according to the FBI’s criminal complaint, Routh had been in the bushes near the golf course for almost 12 hours before he was spotted, leading both U.S. parties to call for beefed-up Secret Service protection for Trump. (Trump, meanwhile, pinned the blame for the ordeal on the Democrats’ “Communist Left Rhetoric.”) Read more about the latest in the investigation here.
The Wrap
What else we’re following
At home: Weakened by the breakup of its deal with the NDP, the Liberals are now racing to pass dozens of bills – including the mammoth online harms bill – before the next election is called.
Abroad: Nine months after a federal program launched to help Canadians rescue family members from Sudan’s brutal war, not a single one of their relatives has managed to flee the country into Canada.
On the ice: Sidney Crosby has inked a two-year, $17.4-million extension with the Penguins – maybe not as much as he could have nabbed, but more than enough to secure his legacy in Pittsburgh.
In the sky: Grab your binoculars – for about an hour tonight, stargazers will catch a partial lunar eclipse of a Harvest and a Super Moon. It’s a celestial trifecta! The eclipse begins at 10:12 p.m. ET / 7:12 p.m. PT and peaks at 10:44 p.m. ET / 7:44 p.m. PT.