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So many citizens of Canada have shown up in Ukraine to fight for the country’s new foreign legion, the organization has set up a separate Canadian battalion, says a Ukrainian government source.

Trudeau was asked on Wednesday for his assessment of whether Ukraine could prevail during a question and answer session following a foreign policy speech he delivered at the Munich Security Conference and the Atlantic Bridge, in Berlin.

“Yes, I do. Unquestionably,” Trudeau said. “The question is how long it’s going to take.”

Ukraine accused Russia on Wednesday of bombing a children’s hospital in the besieged port of Mariupol during a supposed ceasefire to enable some of the hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in the city to escape.

Russia had said it would hold fire to let civilians flee Mariupol and other besieged cities on Wednesday. But the city council said the hospital had been hit several times.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a tweet that “children are under wreckage," claiming Russian forces dropped a bomb on a children’s hospital in Mariupol on Wednesday. He called for the sky to be closed to “stop the killings."https://t.co/n6ZDBcyqtG pic.twitter.com/FGnzCYOopW

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) March 9, 2022

Russia will soon be unable to pay its debts, according to a leading credit ratings agency.

Fitch Ratings downgraded its view of the country’s government debt, warning a default is “imminent”.

The move comes amid increasing international sanctions against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.

A credit rating is intended to help investors understand the level of risk they face in buying a country’s debt – or bonds.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was given a stark reminder of wars present and past on Wednesday in Berlin.

Prior to his first bilateral meeting with Germany’s new chancellor, Trudeau spoke with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, telling him Canada will ship more specialized military equipment.

The federal cabinet has approved an additional $50 million in military and humanitarian aid, Trudeau said during a media availability at the German Chancellery building on Wednesday. Trudeau also invited Zelensky to address Parliament virtually — something the embattled president has agreed to do.

The buck-passing between Poland and the US over the possible use of elderly MiG-29s to hit Russian forces inside Ukraine is one of the west’s few diplomatic failures of the past month. It also raises questions about how far European countries are prepared to escalate militarily before they believe they will touch a dangerous Russian tripwire.

The US and Europe have worked hard to keep their differences over sanctions and oil embargos to a public minimum, and tried to accommodate each other’s national interests. So it was striking on Tuesday when first the Pentagon described a Polish offer to send planes to the US airbase in Ramstein as “untenable”, and then the deputy US secretary of state said the US had not been consulted about the plan.

When Donald Trump was making his most strident complaints about NATO allies spending too little on defence, some member nations — Canada, the Netherlands and Germany, in particular — seemed largely unmoved by the now-former U.S. president’s broadsides.

But Russia’s war on Ukraine — with all of its brutality and destruction — over the past two weeks seems to have succeeded where Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama, failed.