Tag Archives: Maple Crown

Roundup: The kids are back

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Parliament is back today, after nearly six months away, and first order of business is to elect a new Speaker, and there are eight MPs on the list. Fergus is not going to get it, because he proved to be an unsuitable choice, and I doubt that either the Liberals or any of the other opposition parties will want d’Entremont in as an opposition Speaker, because frankly it won’t be worth it. (The rare occasion where the opposition still held the Speaker was when it was Liberal Peter Milliken during the early Harper years, because Milliken was so well-liked, and nobody has managed to live up to his legacy). If you ask me, it should go to Alexandra Mendès, who has the most experience in the Chair, and who has proven herself to be completely no-nonsense when she’s in it, but MPs have time and again decided that they weren’t looking for experience or being no-nonsense. It was the Conservatives who wanted Anthony Rota in the chair last Parliament because he was a genial idiot and was more concerned with being everyone’s friend than in really enforcing decorum and they knew he would go easy on them, while Fergus was a novel choice instead of experienced. It was only after Fergus had one too many oopses that the Bloc decided that maybe it was time for a woman in the Chair again, and were ready to back Mendès if they managed to oust Fergus. Can they get enough votes this time? Stay tuned to find out.

Meanwhile, the Liberals held their first caucus meeting, which meant the inevitable question on the (garbage) Reform Act, and wouldn’t you know it, the Liberals voted against it, which made every pundit in this country cry out about how cowardly they were, while you had journalists writing up garbage copy with things like “they won’t be able to vote out” the leader without this, which is not only wrong, but dangerously wrong. (The CBC story with that particular line did edit it out on the next pass, but yes, I was absolutely livid).

"Liberal MPs decided against adopting the Reform Act during their caucus meeting Sunday, which means they won't be able to vote out the newly-elected leader if they sour on him down the line."No. That is absolutely wrong. Could a single fucking journalist in this country learn some basic civics?

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-05-25T21:21:03.151Z

MPs have always had the ability to vote out a leader. A simple non-confidence vote in caucus is all it takes. You don’t need the stupid Act and its rules because it actually makes it harder by erecting a bunch of thresholds that are absolutely unnecessary. The problem, however, is for decade we had a pundit class who kept insisting that MPs were “powerless,” and we enforced a learned helplessness among them, and then Michel Chong came in with his ridiculous Act in order to look like the democratic hero when he actually just made things worse, and now it’s an intractable frame that everyone insists on using even though it’s false, creates wrong expectations, and is now self-reinforcing because when they vote against it, they’re being explicitly told that they are giving away powers that they might otherwise have, which is bullshit. “But if MPs have the power, then why didn’t they vote out Trudeau?” Because those MPs couldn’t organise a tea party for themselves if their lives depended on it. They had woken up to the problem and were trying to do something, but they were being meek and modest, and trying to convince Trudeau to do the right thing rather than vote him out and embarrass him. Obviously, it didn’t work, and Freeland was the one who needed to make the dramatic move, which goes even more to prove that the Act is useless. The state of civics in this country is intolerably bad, and our pundit class and journalists keep making it worse.

Ukraine Dispatch

The assaults on Kyiv continued over the weekend, with dozens of drones and missiles attacking overnight Saturday, injuring 15, while Sunday saw one of the largest attacks since the start of the war, with 367 drones and missiles fired (which included areas other than Kyiv), killing at least 12 people. Russia also claims to have captured two more settlements in Donetsk and one in Sumy. Another 307 prisoners were swapped by each side on Saturday, in spite of the massive Russian attacks, and another 303 each on Sunday, bringing it to a total of 1000 each side.

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Roundup: Delay to delivery?

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The new natural resource minister, Tim Hodgson, gave a speech in Calgary yesterday and everyone in the energy sector was all hot and bothered because he insisted that they were moving to a culture of delivery instead of delay. And you’ll have to forgive my cynicism, but that seems to completely ignore what the actual issues of delay have been, and if you say “Liberal regulation!” you’re going to get a smack. The premise of saying they need “one project, one review” ignores that that’s been the case for ages now—there are no duplicative reviews, because federal and provincial reviews look at different things, and on projects where they had shared jurisdiction, they set up a joint review panel so that it was *gasp!* one review. Anyone who says they were mired in duplication is frankly not being that honest.

The real issue has been proper consultation, which is what leads projects to wind up in litigation, particularly from Indigenous groups. Harper’s attempt to reform assessments to “streamline” them meant that most of those projects wound up in litigation because, well, they ignored their obligations. In some cases, like Northern Gateway, the Conservatives ignored the process that they put into place for meaningful consultation, and well, the project died on the vine as a result. And with BC and Ontario both pushing legislation to “streamline” projects which basically means bulldozing over environmental and Indigenous obligations, well, that’s all going to wind up in litigation too. This was the whole point of the Impact Assessment Act that Jason Kenney in particularly successfully villainized—it was to ensure proper consultation up-front, at the design phase of a project, so that the rest of the process would go faster because you did the hard work at the beginning. But it became the subject of lies and disinformation, and yes, the federal government’s attempt to exert jurisdiction over certain projects because the polluting effects cross borders didn’t convince the Supreme Court of Canada, but that didn’t render the entire statute or the issues of up-front consultation obsolete or moot, and nobody seems to want to explain that part.

One more thing about Hodgson’s speech was the he singled out Pathways Alliance as a project he wants to see move forward. I’m really hoping that this means he’s telling them to put up or shut up, because we know that they basically went dark because their claims about building a massive carbon capture and storage hub were overblown and they were about to face legal consequences for greenwashing thanks to new powers for the Competition Bureau. And frankly, the whole point of the emissions cap was to tell the energy sector to put up or shut up—that they have been boasting about how they’re going to reduce their emissions, so when the government basically told them to prove it, suddenly they started crying about how this as a “production cap” and it was unfair to them. Girl, please. You insisted you could do this, so prove it.

Meanwhile, we’ve had our first glimpse into Mark Carney’s PMO, and while he’s insistent on punctuality, business attire, and UK spellings (hooray!), and decision paralysis is not setting in (so far), he’s also starting to micromanage all kinds of things that he shouldn’t be, which sounds an awful lot like a Harper trait. Part of the problem so far is a lack of a proper chief of staff, and that ministers haven’t staffed up yet either, and yet he wants to operate at a breakneck pace. But there are other warning signs—because he doesn’t understand politics, he really hasn’t given thought to how to navigate a minority House of Commons, to say nothing of the Senate (ahem), and not knowing how to deal with Parliament could lead to a situation where the Conservatives can team up with the Bloc and the NDP yet again to start frustrating anything passing once again—and for all of their talk about working together and getting things done, don’t think for a second that they’re actually not more interested in scoring points and embarrassing the Liberals. Trudeau lost the ability to manage these things, in part because of disinterest, and we’ll see if Carney doesn’t make the same mistake.

Ukraine Dispatch

There was a massive missile and drone attack against Kyiv overnight, which has injured at least eight people (Photos). Ukraine and Russia exchanged 390 prisoners each on Friday, marking one of the largest swaps since the war began.

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Roundup: The new ambassador doesn’t get it

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The new US ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, has been making the media rounds, and is just one more in a long line of American politicians who just can’t understand why Canadians are so upset with the Americans. (It’s a complete mystery!) Surely, we must be happy that we could have the “lowest tariffs of any country,” instead of, oh, the free trade that allowed for integrated supply chains between both countries. Why wouldn’t we be happy with that? And in a preview for an interview to be aired over the weekend, he says there are easier ways to send messages to Trump than to bring over the King.

*sighs*

Having the King open the next session of Parliament is not only about sending a message to Trump. Yes, that is part of it, and you can bet that it’s actually going to be something he pays more attention to than a phone call because his attention span only lasts as long as the next person who talks to him, so what good is a phone call in that regard? Also? This is as much about domestic reassurance as it is a message to Trump. As Trump has threatened us, we had a bunch of people wrongly believe that the King needed to act unilaterally and say something that might cause a diplomatic incident, and others actually believed that he personally invited Trump on the second state visit when no, that was at the behest of the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer. And no, he can’t say anything unilaterally, because that goes against what constitutional monarchy stands for, and why there was the Glorious Revolution in 1688. If anyone is to blame for Charles not speaking up on Canada’s behalf earlier, it was Justin Trudeau’s, because he very much liked to ignore the Crown as much as he possibly could (probably because it pulled the focus away from him).

Oh, and Hoekstra keeps saying that the “51st state” stuff is over, and that Trump isn’t saying it, and they have more important things to worry about. But he said it just two weeks ago, and do you actually think that anything is really over for Trump? He’s incredibly angry with his past self for signing the New NAFTA. And I get that Hoekstra needs to play this particular role, but come on. Demonstrate that you’ve paid the slightest bit of attention to Canada since you were named ambassador, and read the room.

https://bsky.app/profile/effinbirds.com/post/3lps2mm7mmf26

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia is claiming to have taken a settlement between Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka in Donetsk region.

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Roundup: A single mandate letter for Cabinet

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Prime minister Mark Carney released his “mandate letter,” singular, yesterday following the “Cabinet planning forum,” which is how he’s re-branded a retreat—because nothing says Canada’s New Government™ like renaming everything. And the thing is, it’s not much of a mandate letter at all­, but rather a press release that lists seven priorities that essentially tasks ministers to figure out how their files fit into these priorities and do them, which are sufficiently broad that makes it hard to actually hold anyone to account, which was supposed to be the whole reason why Justin Trudeau made the mandate letters public in the first place (though his too were full of repetitive boilerplate language and values statements, but they did at least have some specific items for each minister).

Note: Apologies for this being late/incomplete, but I’ve been really sick the last couple of days, but I at least wanted to put something out before all of the links went stale.

In case you missed it:

  • My National Magazine profile of new justice minister Sean Fraser.
  • My weekend column that points to the big decisions that Mark Carney is going to have to make about the Senate.
  • My column demonstrates why we’re not really headed toward a two-party system in Canada, because it’s largely based on a false premise.
  • My Loonie Politics Quick Take on Carney’s creeping presidentialism with those “decision notes” he’s been signing for the cameras.

Ukraine Dispatch

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1925153620225310721

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Roundup: Platforms, budgets, and estimates

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The news that there won’t be a spring budget meant a day of wailing and gnashing of teeth, much of it misunderstanding about what the budget actually is and does. Pierre Poilievre summoned the media outside of West Block to decry that Mark Carney “has no plan” because there isn’t a budget, and his MPs have been tweeting up a storm to insist that “Carney lied” by not having a budget, but this, as usual, is little more than low-rent disinformation that treats voters like idiots because they don’t know the parliamentary budgetary cycle.

Budgets by their very nature are political documents. They provide guideposts for spending plans, but we just had an election and the Liberals have a reasonably comprehensive platform document, so that can provide the broad strokes for spending plans in the same way that a budget document does. The thing we are missing is an updated chart of what the current debt/deficit projections look like, and what the growth projections are, but again, the growth projections are merely an amalgamation of private sector forecasts and are no longer based on Department of Finance projections, and we’re in a moment of profound economic uncertainty because of Trump’s trade war, so they could very well go up in smoke next week, and wouldn’t be of much use to anyone. There is also the practical reality that the election was three weeks ago, and the Department of Finance wouldn’t have time to prepare a budget document, even based on the projections from the platform document, nor have it ready before the Commons rises for the summer. And if anyone thinks they want to sit in Ottawa’s hot and muggy summer climate, well, no they actually do not. That’s just political posturing (or sheer ignorance of what summer is like here).

I did also want to point you to this thread which corrects something from this The Canadian Press explainer about the budget document, budget implementation acts, and the Estimates. The estimates are the actual spending documents about how much the government plans to spend. A budget implementation act is legislation that enacts things like tax changes from the budget document, which are proper omnibus bills, but in recent years have become abusive omnibus bills as governments will stuff extraneous things into the budget document in order to include them in the omnibus BIA for the sake of expediency. It abuses process and shouldn’t be allowed (including with the fig leaf of “it was in the budget document!”) but this is also was six years of unrelenting procedural warfare has wrought—if you can’t pass bills because the opposition parties want to play games, then you shove everything into an abusive BIA, and the cycle perpetuates, which isn’t good for anyone (which is also a reminder that actions have consequences). Suffice to say, there will be an Estimates Bill passed in the four weeks that Parliament is back, so it’s not like there isn’t anything from government on spending plans.

Programming Note: I am taking the full long weekend off, because I’m utterly exhausted. See you on Wednesday.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia claims that they have taken two more settlements in Eastern Ukraine, which Ukraine disputes. President Zelenskyy is in Türkiye for the “peace talks” that aren’t actually going to happen because he called Putin’s bluff.

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Roundup: Holding confederation hostage

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Mid-afternoon Alberta time, premier Danielle Smith gave a live address which had all of the appearances of some kind of hostage video, where she is promising to kill confederation if her demands aren’t met. Those demands are largely outrageous in and of themselves—guaranteed pipeline access, killing all federal environmental protection laws that would affect Alberta, perverting equalisation to give them a “per capita share” (it doesn’t operate on a per capita basis), and taking any kind of export tax off the table that could be used as leverage against Trump if we needed it. It was grievance porn, and largely just riling up her base of lunatics—whom she also defended—as they gear up to force some kind of separatism referendum, even though that wouldn’t actually mean what they think it does.

Would like to hear more from the Alberta Premier about how the industrial carbon price is "crippling" in Alberta.A year ago, it was "working."www.theglobeandmail.com/business/art…

— Aaron Wherry (@aaronwherry.bsky.social) 2025-05-05T21:30:03.882Z

https://bsky.app/profile/emmettmacfarlane.com/post/3lohiwnqoyk2y

The whole issue of the separatism referendum is also predicated on her being too-clever-by-half, saying she doesn’t believe in separation and believes in “sovereignty within a united Canada” (which is mostly horseshit), but she’s still going to game the rules to make it easier for the loons to force a referendum. “Oh, there’s no blood on my hands!” she insists, while she bought the knife and handed it to the loons. Politicians who use referendums as diversions or as a clever way of trying to defuse a situation have often seen that situation blow up in their faces, whether it was the capital flight from Quebec in 1980 and again in 1995, or Brexit. And like Brexit, she is willing to tell a bunch of lies to support it, Naheed Nenshi is denouncing this move and correctly pointing out that she is taking Albertans for fools, but Smith is slippery, and that’s going to be a problem the longer this is allowed to continue.

David Cameron thought he was being clever too.

— Stephanie Carvin (@stephaniecarvin.bsky.social) 2025-05-05T22:23:27.486Z

Without popular support for separation, she has seriously limited options. But Moscrop is exactly right: this is live ammo-stuff now, the way Brexit was, the way Trump as a candidate was. She is reckless, and part of a political movement of delusion and dishonesty. Very dangerous

— Bruce Arthur (@brucearthur.bsky.social) 2025-05-05T22:19:08.305Z

Meanwhile, Alberta’s acting Chief Medical Officer of Health spent yesterday morning passive-voicing the decline in vaccination rates as he called for people to step up and get measles vaccinations. If only Danielle Smith and her hand of swivel-eyed loons didn’t boost vaccine hesitancy in order to “own the Libs.” Honestly…

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia launched 116 drones overnight, targeting mostly Sumy and Donetsk regions. President Zelenskyy visited the Czech Republic to get commitments on more artillery shells, and pilot training.

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Roundup: The changing votes of the 905

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There was an interesting piece in the Star over the weekend, where a bunch of their reporters went out into the 905 belt around Toronto, in order to talk to newcomer communities who have been increasingly switching their votes from the Liberals to the Conservatives, and managed to capture a few of those ridings this time around (and costing the Liberals their majority). But while we shouldn’t always assume that immigrant and newcomer communities will be Liberals, even though there has been this particular trope that they have been told to vote Liberal because Pierre Trudeau really opened up immigration into this country back in the seventies, I do think that trope is overused and misses some of the other points, like the fact that they often pick up on dog-whistling by Conservatives, or that their ways of trying to engage with newcomer communities can be ham-fisted (such as the famous example of Jason Kenney going to every ethno-cultural buffet event and saying things like “I hear you guys hate the gays too. You should vote for us!” And no, that didn’t wind up being successful, even though a mythology was built up around it that doesn’t reflect voter turnout).

What I found instead in this Star piece was that in many of these communities, they were blaming the federal Liberals and Justin Trudeau for things that are squarely within provincial jurisdiction—like housing, or the uptick in crime that that has been hammered away at in those areas. No, none of the reporters made this distinction in the story, and we find ourselves back in the place where nobody in this country wants to hold the premiers to account for their failures. (For their corruption, yes, to an extent, but not their failures to do their jobs). Pierre Poilievre has successfully weaponised the incompetence of the premiers against the federal Liberals and Trudeau in particular, which Trudeau let him get away with time and again because he refused to call the premiers out. But the even bigger irony is that these are regions that have increasingly been voting for Doug Ford, who has been the cause of, or done nothing about, the very problems they are raising as to why they switched their votes.

I would also note that there are some other fairly disturbing undertones in some of the responses from these voters—far-right talking points like “mass immigration,” for example, or the fact that they appear to be pulling up the ladder behind them. They immigrated this country and bought houses in these suburbs, but immigrants who came in behind them and can’t find affordable housing are the problem? Do you see the issue here? I think this is a warning sign we should be paying more attention to, but again, if the premiers did their fucking jobs, we wouldn’t be seeing some of these issues able to take root within these newcomer communities.

Ukraine Dispatch

An overnight drone attack on Kyiv has injured at least 11, as Russia is calling for a ceasefire in advance of celebrations to mark the anniversary of VE Day. The mayor of the Russian port city of Novorossiisk has called a state of emergency after an alleged Ukrainian drone attack. Ukraine says that they shot down a Russian Su-30 fighter jet with a missile fired from one of their maritime drones.

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Roundup: The King is coming!

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Mark Carney gave his first post-election news conference yesterday, and he ensured that it was something of a news tsunami, but also that the tone and tenor of his government is vastly different from that of his predecessor. (Well, his predecessor post-2017ish. For the first couple of years, Trudeau was still trying pretty hard to hold to the things he campaigned on in a promise to be a generational change). This included some timelines for the next few weeks, and it’s a lot. So with that in mind, Carney goes to Washington on Tuesday to meet with Trump, the new Cabinet will be sworn in on the week of the 12th, Parliament will be recalled on the 26th for the election of a new Speaker, and then the 27th will be the Speech From the Throne, and it will be delivered by the King, for the first time since 1977 (and the first time a monarch has opened our parliament since 1957). In addition, he says we have the biggest reorientation of our economy to accomplish since the Second World War, and he’s going to balance the operating budget within three years with no cuts to services (indeed, the rollout of full dental care is continuing on schedule), and he’s not going to enter into any kind of formal arrangement with the NDP as there is no point in doing so. Here are five of the priorities outlined by Carney.

https://twitter.com/RoyalFamily/status/1918325678144884794

There will, of course, be a bunch of grumbling about the King arriving to deliver the Speech, but the thing we need to get out of the way is that he’s the King of Canada, not the King of the UK (or England, which hasn’t had a separate Crown since 1707) as far as we’re concerned, and so he’s not a “foreign monarch.” Canada has had a separate Crown from the UK since the Statute of Westminster in 1931, and even before that, the Crown in Canada manifested in very different ways from the UK since Princess Louise was the Chatelaine of Rideau Hall. (I have more on this in the Crown chapter of my book). The fact that we are bringing out the King to play a bigger role as our sovereignty is threatened is a reflection of just how different we are from the US, and why we will never be part of them, and because Trump idolises the royals, this becomes a thumb in his eye. We cannot forget that.

The other major development yesterday was that Conservative MP Damien Kurek has offered up his seat to Pierre Poilievre, so that he can return to the House of Commons, and surprising nobody, it’s one of the most conservative (and indeed, whitest) ridings in the country, where he got 81.8 percent of the vote in Monday’s election. While Carney said he would call the by-election at the earliest opportunity, Kurek can’t actually resign until a certain point because of rules in place, after which it’s a five-week campaign, and so that means it probably won’t happen until early July, so Poilievre will be out of the Chamber for the entire spring sitting (which is only slated to be about four weeks long). Kurek was six months away from qualifying for an MP pension, so one imagines that the party will work to compensate him in some way.

Ukraine Dispatch

A mass drone attack late Friday hit an apartment block in Kharkiv, injuring 46 people. The US State Department has approved the sale of $310 worth of training and sustainment for Ukraine’s F-16 fighter jets.

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Roundup: Danielle Smith’s weapon of mass distraction

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Alberta premier Danielle Smith continues to be in increasing hot water—and oh, look, her justice minister is related by marriage to someone at the centre of the healthcare procurement scandal—so she has decided to go full-bore into her weapon of mass distraction, which is to attack the federal government and to try and call out Mark Carney for…reasons. She’s asking Carney for a “reset” of relations with Alberta (translation: Give me everything I want), because of course she is. One of the things she announced was a new court challenge of the clean electricity regulations, because of course she is. Nothing like making the lawyers a bunch more money.

https://twitter.com/maxfawcett/status/1917945085674791322

Throughout this, Smith insists she’s not stoking separatism *cough* and that these are just “hypotheticals” about the group of loons in the province itching to trigger a plebiscite by starting to gather signatures (before the bill has even passed), but the fact that she is lowering the threshold for just this eventually is a sign that she knows she’s doing it deliberately. And hey, she even says that there’s no appetite in the province for their own separate pension plan after all (because she got spanked by the reality that she couldn’t raid the majority of the CPP on the way out), so that must mean she’s serious about not stoking separatism, right? Does she think we’re all stupid and can’t see through her transparent bullshit?

https://bsky.app/profile/emmettmacfarlane.com/post/3lo4edxbfjs2l

https://bsky.app/profile/emmettmacfarlane.com/post/3lo4eimwtas2l

https://bsky.app/profile/emmettmacfarlane.com/post/3lo4ekdqy2s2l

https://bsky.app/profile/emmettmacfarlane.com/post/3lo4en275nc2l

Of course, because Scott Moe can’t help himself, he said that he’s a “true Canadian” but wouldn’t stop a public vote on separation if they triggered a plebiscite under provincial legislation. So…as premier he’s willing to also drive out investment and opportunity from companies that have no interest in dealing with this kind of nonsense? Wow, that’s some smart politicking!

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian drone attack late Thursday set houses ablaze in Zaporizhzhia and injured 14, but didn’t cause any deaths.

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Roundup: Nonsense about inflation, again

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Day twenty-nine, and in spite of the holiday, there were again campaign events from all of the main parties, as they begin their last-minute stops through battleground ridings across the country. Mark Carney was in Ottawa, where he warned about the “$140 billion in divisive cuts” in Poilievre’s promises, which they have tallied up as Poilievre has still not released his full platform. Carney will be in Charlottetown, PEI, today, followed by Truro, Nova Scotia, and Fredericton, New Brunswick.

Pierre Poilievre was in Surrey, BC, where he promised to cut government spending in order to reduce inflation…which is already at target, and government spending hasn’t fuelled inflation, because the last spike was caused by global supply chains breaking down in the pandemic, and the effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But because he has to stick to his branding, he’s also trying to all inflation a “tax” and claim that it benefits Brookfield, which in turn benefits Carney, which is not only convoluted logic, but pretty stupid. Poilievre also repeated the falsehood that inflation is being driven by “printed money” (and for the love of Hermes, could a media outlet actually refute that claim, because it’s entirely false. FFS!) Oh, and the cuts will only be on “consultants,” because that’s another magical money tree. Poilievre will be in Scarborough, Ontario, today. And maybe he’ll finally release his costed platform like he says he will.

Jagmeet Singh was in Victoria, BC, where he made a bunch of commitments as to what will appear in the first budget in the next Parliament, and it’s laughable because the NDP will be lucky to get official party status, let alone any influence on just what is in the budget. Singh will be in Nanaimo, BC, followed by Comox and Port Moody today.

In other campaign news, Correctional Services found no evidence that a (clearly faked) document was circulating in prisons that several Conservatives purported was from the Liberals to try to get prisoners to support them in the election. Shocking, I know. Poilievre dodged questions about whether he would repeal the Liberals’ handgun ban. While certain Conservative-aligned chuds have been flooding social media with conspiracy theories about Elections Canada offering pencils instead of pens or sharpies at ballot boxes, Elections Canada reminds you that you can use either. (Said chuds should also be charged).

Speaking of Poilievre's economically illiterate announcement today…

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T18:21:38.960Z

Ukraine Dispatch

After the “Easter ceasefire,” Kyiv and half of Ukraine are under air raid alerts. Ukraine lists some 2935 violations of Russia’s own “ceasefire,” including blasts reported throughout Russian-occupied Donetsk region.

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