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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Antonio Guterres is the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), who attempted last month  to arrange the escape from Russian capture of Ukrainian soldiers and NATO commanders,  knowing they had committed war crimes. He was asked to explain; he refuses.   

Trevor Cadieu is a Canadian lieutenant-general who was appointed the chief of staff and head of the Canadian Armed Forces last August; was stopped in September; retired from the Army this past April, and went to the Ukraine, where he is in hiding. From whom he is hiding – Canadians or Russians – where he is hiding, and what he will say to explain are questions Cadieu isn’t answering, yet.

Guterres isn’t the first UN secretary-general to be investigated for abetting war crimes against civilians.    

Kurt Waldheim (right), an Austrian who was Secretary-General between 1972 and 1981, had been a Nazi Party member and German Wehrmacht officer serving in staff intelligence and command roles in the invasions of Yugoslavia and Greece. To the evidence of German war crimes, witnesses, records, and a US government prosecution, Waldheim claimed he didn’t know. He took Canadian lessons in forgetfulness when he was Austria’s ambassador in Ottawa between 1956 and 1960. On his deathbed, he admitted “mistakes” but not complicity.

Trevor Cadieu graduated from Canada’s officer training school in 1995 and became a mobile armour and tank specialist, serving in Bosnia, twice in Afghanistan, then in Israel and Jordan, before he was promoted to command of an army division in 2017,  and then in 2019 to Director of Staff, the number-two post in the Canadian military; read more here  and here.  Cadieu once told his hometown newspaper that in the Kandahar region of southwestern Afghanistan his tanks were demonstrating “the resolve of the coalition to bring security to this area.”   Tank tactics in flat and lowland geography are Cadieu’s specialty.  

Tank-fighting country the Canadian military have been preparing in western Ukraine – left to right, Volyn region in the northwest;   Lvov region, centre;  Chernivtsi in the southwest.

Cadieu was especially close from their time together as cadets, as junior officers in the Strathcona regiment, and then as tank commanders in Kandahar to Colonel Mark Lubiniecki, who ran the Canadian operation in western Ukraine in 2017-2018. Lubiniecki’s family comes from the western Ukraine. Once back in that region, he taught mobile armour, tank and anti-tank tactics to the Ukrainians.  The strategic target of those tactics – and of Cadieu’s and Lubiniecki’s plans – was the Russian army; that’s to say, fighting the Russian Army with NATO tanks and artillery, using Ukrainian troops and fighting on Ukrainian territory. When Cadieu moved to Ottawa in 2019, Lubiniecki also moved to Ottawa.  These two Canadian soldiers have been planning the tank war in Ukraine for several years.

Left, Trevor Cadieu; right, Mark Lubiniecki.

But Cadieu’s sexual conduct with a female cadet before they graduated in 1994 has interrupted this battle plan. Although he was promoted to lieutenant-general and to Chief of the Defence Staff at the beginning of last August, he was stopped when the woman filed formal charges against him a month later, and Cadieu was suspended.  The woman had been harassed for weeks before, and her case against Cadieu suppressed during the Canadian election campaign of that August.  In addition to the Cadieu case,  sex crimes investigations have targeted four Canadian army generals and a navy admiral.

On April 5 Cadieu resigned his post in Ottawa, and Canadian military sources later confirmed  he was in the Ukraine. At the same time the Canadian military group in western Ukraine was suspended on February 12, and then evacuated to Poland and to Canada on March 18.  Reporter David Pugliese broke the news of Cadieu’s move to the Ukraine on April 21; he cited sources in the Canadian military and Defence Ministry in Ottawa, as well as the former cadet who had filed her charges against Cadieu.  

Left, the Ottawa Citizen report on Trevor Cadieu; right, David Pugliese. “Trevor Cadieu left the Canadian military on April 5, according to the Department of National Defence. He travelled to Ukraine shortly after with the intention to volunteer for that country’s military which is battling a Russian invasion, multiple defence sources confirmed to this newspaper”.

The day before Pugliese’s story was published, the Canadian government’s broadcaster CBC reported his retirement, but not his move to the Ukraine.   Pugliese’s report forced the  Defense Department spokesman Daniel Le Bouthillier to claim that the former general had decided to leave for ther Ukraine on his own and did not have any kind of support from the Canadian Armed Forces. When the Russian government announced sanctions against Canadian government officials on April 21, several Canadian generals were named, but not Cadieu.  

As the battle for Mariupol ended, social media and the Russian press began reporting on the presence of high-ranking NATO officers in the Azovstal underground bunkers, the Ukrainian command centre for the battle; in the first part of April the Russians shot down several abortive attempts at break-out and rescue by Ukrainian military helicopters. On April 16 the Russian Defence Ministry announced its count of 400 foreign soldiers in the bunkers; they reportedly spoke six foreign languages.  

The Canadian press disclosure of Cadieu’s presence in the Ukraine was combined with the news of Guterres’s UN plan to evacuate the bunkers on April 28, when Channel One, Russian state television, and Tass reported Eduard Basurin from the Donetsk People’s Republic as saying: “Information appeared now and then,” he said, “that one of the former Canadian army generals may be holed up there [in the Azovstal steel complex]. He first seemed to get out of sight and then the Canadian Defense Ministry issued a statement that this general gave a notice that he was resigning from the army and moving to Ukraine. Perhaps, [the UN] is trying to rescue him.”  For details of the UN plan, read this.   

On May 5, the Defence Ministry and other Russian government sources announced that the civilian evacuation had been completed, and that a total of 560 had been accounted for – 101 of them in the UN evacuation between April 29 and May 1. By the Russian count, this leaves about 2,000 soldiers including 400 foreigners in the bunkers.  NATO government press reports also make the total around 2,000.   

In this broadcast on Gorilla Radio by host Chris Cook, the significance of the two plans, the Guterres plan to rescue the NATO men in the east,  and the Cadieu plan to fight the war in the west, are spelled out, beginning at Minute 31:27. For the longer history of Canadian government planning to go to war against Russia in the Ukraine, listen to Yves Engler from Montreal in the first half.

Gorilla Radio is broadcast every Thursday on CFUV 101.9 FM from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.  The radio station can be heard here .  The Gorilla Radio transcripts are also published by the Pacific Free Press and on the blog.    For Chris Cook’s broadcast archive, click to open.

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