Disinfo: Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland is a descendant of Nazi collaborators

Recurrent pro-Kremlin disinformation targeting former Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland and painting her as a Nazi sympathiser because of her grandfather’s presumed activities.

Freeland has been a constant target for Russian disinformation. She is banned from travelling to Russia, as part of the tit-for-tat game of escalating sanctions that the Russians played in the wake of Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. Freeland is obviously singled out for attention as leading voice in the Canadian government concerning Russia’s actions there.

Indeed, tales of Freeland’s grandfather Michael Chomiak have been circulating on pro-Kremlin social media accounts and websites since she joined the office of Foreign Affairs on January 10, 2017.

There is no evidence that Chomiak wrote any of the anti-Jewish diatribes published in the Krakivski Visti newspaper. After the war he told his family he had worked with the anti-Nazi resistance, helping its members get false papers.

Ms Freeland's uncle, John-Paul Himka has studied family history and told the Globe and Mail:

He was the editor of a legal newspaper in Nazi-occupied Poland. He never signed anything in the paper. He never made policy or that kind of thing. It wouldn't be his call.

Read our analysts on this popular propaganda technique entitled: Nazi east, Nazi west, Nazi over the cuckoo's nest.

Read similar cases in our database claiming that Freeland lied about her grandfather's Nazi past; or that Freeland (who is of Ukrainian heritage) is the granddaughter of a Nazi collaborator.

This article contained another claim that the 2014 coup turned Ukraine into a Nazi state.