Diplomatic relations between Canada and Ukraine were formally established in 1991, following Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union. However, the two countries' relationship dates back further, due to the long history of Ukrainian immigration to Canada.
History
Formal relations Diplomatic relations were established between Canada and Ukraine on December 2, 1991.For a detailed discussion of Canada's early diplomatic engagement with Canada, see Bohdan Kordan, "Canadian Ukrainian Relations: Articulating the Canadian Interest," in L. Hajda, ed. (1996), Ukraine in the World: Studies in the International Relations and Security Structure of a Newly Independent State. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Canada was the first western nation to recognize Ukraine's independence from the USSR. Canada opened its embassy in Kyiv in April 1992, and the Embassy of Ukraine in Ottawa opened in October of that same year, paid for mostly by donations from the Ukrainian-Canadian community. Ukraine opened a consulate general in Toronto in 1993 and opened another in Edmonton in 2018.
The main bilateral agreement is the joint declaration of the "Special Partnership" between the two countries signed in 1994 and renewed in 2001.
Sales of Canadian military hardware to Ukraine were permitted by the Justin Trudeau government in December 2017 when Global Affairs Canada minister Chrystia Freeland lifted the prior restrictions.
Free-trade agreement On September 22, 2009, talks began between Canada and Ukraine on a free trade agreement.Tymoshenko hopes for more effective cooperation with Canada after creation of free trade area, Interfax-Ukraine (September 23, 2009)Minister Day Announces Free Trade Talks with Ukraine, Government of Canada (September 22, 2009)
Ukrainian prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper in July 2015 announced the Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement, and signed it in July 2016. It took effect on 1 August 2017.
High level visits High-level visits from Canada to Ukraine In 1992, the Governor General of Canada, Ramon Hnatyshyn, visited Ukraine—his ancestral homeland with which he closely identified—in his capacity as vice-regent. In 2005 Governor General Adrienne Clarkson made a formal state visit and in 2009 Governor General Michaëlle Jean made another. Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien visited Ukraine in 1999.
The annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation occurred in March 2014. In September 2014, Ukrainians visited Ottawa to plead for weapons, including anti-tank missiles, surveillance gear and armoured vehicles, to subdue the separatists on their eastern border. Defence Minister Jason Kenney refused. In March 2014, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper travelled to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arsenii Yatseniuk. He became the first G7 leader to visit the epicentre of Ukraine's recent divisive protests. In June 2014, Canadian Prime Minister Harper attended the inauguration of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Kyiv. During the visit, Harper met with Poroshenko to reaffirm Canada’s support for Ukraine amid the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine and expressed solidarity with Ukraine’s efforts to defend its sovereignty and pursue closer ties with Europe.
In June 2015, Canadian Prime Minister Harper travelled to Kyiv, where he met with President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk amid renewed fighting in eastern Ukraine. During the visit, Harper reaffirmed Canada’s support for Ukraine and discussed international efforts to respond to Russian.
In July 2016, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau visited Canadian military trainers in western Ukraine. Petro Poroshenko thanked Canada for its contributions. The two signed a free-trade agreement.
In January 2022, Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly went to Ukraine and met the prime minister and the president amid tensions between Ukraine and Russia. She also visited to Canadian instructors who were training Ukrainians as part of Operation UNIFIER.
In May 2022, Trudeau visited Irpin travelled to Kyiv to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
In June 2023, Trudeau travelled to Kyiv to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal.
In February 2024, Trudeau made the unannounced visit to Kyiv to take part in a display of international solidarity to mark the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, together with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
In February 2025, Trudeau travelled to Kyiv to mark the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In August 2025, Prime Minister Mark Carney travelled to Kyiv to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko.
High-level visits from Ukraine to Canada Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma also undertook a visit to Canada in 1994, his first state visit abroad. And in 2008, President Viktor Yushchenko travelled to Canada on a state visit. In Ottawa, he addressed a joint session of the Canadian Parliament's Senate and House of Commons, a rare privilege for foreign dignitaries.
In September 2014, President Petro Poroshenko met with Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper and Governor General of Canada David Johnston, took part in the joint session of the Parliament of Canada where he delivered a speech.
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, then former prime minister of Ukraine, visited Ottawa in May 2017 seeking weapons and met with Chrystia Freeland and Ralph Goodale.
In July 2019, the third Ukraine Reform Conference was held in Toronto for three days, where more than 800 people from 36 countries, as well as international finance organizations such as the IMF, took part. The theme was Euro-Atlantic integration of Ukraine. Newly inaugurated President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced a new agreement for Canadian military hardware to be used as part of the effort to subdue the separatists in the east along the border with Russia. Justin Trudeau refused to sign the agreement. Trudeau and Zelenskyy "declared a mutual interest in improving student exchanges and youth work permits" but nothing was done, and money was found to "promote gender equality".
On September 22, 2023, Zelenskyy spoke to the Canadian Parliament. Zelenskyy joined Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the rest of Parliament as they gave a standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka, introduced by the speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota, as a "veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians." It was later discovered that Hunka did so in a Ukrainian Division of the SS, a Nazi-aligned unit. The incident made international news, receiving widespread criticism and condemnation. The speaker then resigned and Trudeau apologized on behalf of Parliament. In the aftermath, an endowment in Hunka's name at the University of Alberta's Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies shut down, and Jewish organizations called for open records on Nazi war criminals.
In June 2025, Zelenskyy travelled to Kananaskis to meet with Prime Minister Mark Carney and to attend the 51st G7 summit.
2026 Partnership
On 10 September 2026 in Calgary, President Zelenskyy and Prime Minister Carney signed a “Canada-Ukraine declaration for a 100-year partnership“.
Politics
Canada wants to promote democratic reform in Ukraine, encouraging Ukraine to engage and possibly join the EU and NATO, and distance itself from Russia. Reform are a delicate matter in Ukraine, because the East vs. West trajectory (Russia vs. Europe) of the country is a sensitive political issue in Ukraine. Direct involvement in reform efforts by Canadian officials would violate international protocol (seen as interference in Ukraine's internal affairs), and possibly undercut pro-Western efforts in the country. Many Canadians (including members of parliament, and former Prime Minister John Turner) were part of an international observer team that monitored Ukraine's 2004 presidential election. Canadian media were typically sympathetic to the Orange Revolution, with the national magazine Maclean's running a front-page story on the protests. Election irregularities documented by observer teams in 2004 led to a redo of the election, which resulted in the victory of pro-Western presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko. Canadian Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson, Canada's head-of-state, attended Yushchenko's investiture wearing an orange scarf, the colour of the pro-Western movement.
Former Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland's maternal grandparents and mother emigrated from Ukraine. She was actively engaged with pro-democracy and pro-Western movements in Ukraine during the late 1980s. In 2017, allegations circulated in the Russian and Canadian press that Freeland's grandfather, whom she had described as a political exile "with a responsibility to keep alive the idea of an independent Ukraine," had been a Nazi propagandist, which her office denied and she implied were Russian disinformation. However, it was later proven that her grandfather had indeed been the editor of a Nazi newspaper in Poland, and that she had known this for at least twenty years.
Sub-national ties
Much of the relationship is based on the legacy of migration fo Canada. Ukrainians did not migrate to Canada equally from all parts of Ukraine, or settle equally everywhere in Canada. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Ukrainian immigrants settled in the Canadian prairies and account for the region's strong ties to Ukraine, especially Western Ukraine, from which most majority of them had come. Ontario also drew Ukrainian immigrants, especially in the immediate post-war period. Prevented during the Soviet period, migration to Canada from Ukraine resumed after its 1991 independence under provincial immigration programs. Migrants came to Saskatchewan and Manitoba after they set up these programs, having identified Ukraine as a potentially significant source of skilled workers.
Most Ukrainians who migrated to Alberta between 1893 and 1929 came from a few small districts in western Ukraine, many of them in the current Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast. Alberta premier Ralph Klein visited Ivano-Frankivsk in 2002, and governor of Ivano-Frankivsk Mykhailo Vyshyvaniuk reciprocated with a visit to Edmonton in which the two governments signed a trade and cooperation agreement. Alberta was expected to sign a similar agreement with neighbouring Lviv Oblast. Premier Roy Romanow's also visited Ukraine in 1995 and invited Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma to Saskatchewan in 2000. Delegations at the ministerial level to Ukraine from Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan led to agreements and memoranda of understanding on culture, education and economic matters. The prairie provinces also established formal advisory committees: Saskatchewan-Ukraine Advisory Committee Manitoba-Ukraine Secretariat Advisory Council on Alberta-Ukraine Relations).
Beyond a number of regional twinning agreements, e.g. Saskatchewan-Chernivtsi oblast, a number of Canadian cities are also twinned with Ukrainian municipal counterparts at the local level, including Toronto/Kyiv, Winnipeg/Lviv, Vancouver/Odesa, and Saskatoon/Chernivtsi.
Kyiv and Toronto (Ontario) Chernivtsi and Saskatoon (Saskatchewan) Lviv and Winnipeg (Manitoba) Odesa and Vancouver (British Columbia) Uzhhorod and Hamilton (Ontario) Dnipro and Durham Region (Ontario) Kamianets-Podilskyi and Brantford (Ontario) Sokal and North Grenville (Ontario) Vashkivtsi and Sioux Lookout (Ontario) Stryi and Vegreville (Alberta)
Humanitarian and development aid to Ukraine