Canada will be procuring an additional 200 armored personnel carriers from Roshel to donate them to Ukraine, Canada’s defense minister Anita Anand announced during a visit to Kyiv on January 18.
The government has signed a C$90 million (US$66.7M) contract with Canadian-based Roshel for the purchase of Senator armored personnel carriers. These will be joining the 100 vehicles already handed over by Canada to Ukraine last year.
The announcement on the APC donation comes just a week after Canada revealed it would buy the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS) and associated munitions from the United States to donate it to Ukraine. This donation will cost Canada approximately C$406 million, the government said.
With these two investments, Canada has rounded up the additional $500 million in military aid to Ukraine announced by prime minister Justin Trudeau in November 2022.
This is part of the over $1 billion in military assistance that Canada has committed since February 2022, and over $5 billion that the country has committed in combined military, financial, humanitarian, and other aid. Canada’s military assistance includes 39 armored combat support Vehicles, a combination of eight commercial pattern armored vehicles and Senator APCs, anti-tank weapons, small arms, M777 howitzers and associated ammunition.
In addition to Kyiv, Anand also visited Irpin – a suburb of Kyiv that Russia occupied at the beginning of its further invasion of Ukraine. There, she reiterated Canada’s strong condemnation of Russia’s “barbaric and indiscriminate killings.”
Minister Anand also met with members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces trained by Canada under operation Unifier and visited a hospital where she met with wounded Ukrainian soldiers.
“During my visit to Kyiv today, I reaffirmed that Canada’s support to Ukraine will continue for as long as it takes. What happens here in Ukraine will determine the future of the international rules that protect us all, and therefore, the kind of world in which our kids will grow up,” Anand said during the visit.
