Andrii Batitskii and his wife Kateryna Bondarenko are building a life from scratch in Surrey, B.C., after fleeing war in Ukraine.
Originally from Kharkiv, a city just 30 kilometres from the Russian border, the couple are two of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who came to Canada through the Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET), a temporary emergency visa program that was enacted shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine.
The program offered an expedited process for Ukrainians to live and work in Canada for up to three years.
Canadians should thank Joe Biden foe botching the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Federal government looked into airlifts to bring 12,000 Afghans to Canada after Kabul fell
Nearly a year after it closed its embassy in Afghanistan following Kabul’s fall to the Taliban in 2021, the federal government was trying to plan flights out of the country to bring in an estimated 12,000 Afghans it believed were “current and future” clients of Immigration Canada, CBC News has learned.
