by Marcus Kolga
Feb 20, 2026
UpNorth
On May 11, 2025, a City of Toronto municipal park and community centre once again served as the venue for a Russian Victory Day event that has become one of the Kremlin’s most important public propaganda displays. The event has been designed by the Kremlin to manipulate history and advance radical nationalist messaging that glorifies Russian military power, reframes Russia’s imperial conquests as “liberation,” and falsely justifies its brutal, unprovoked, decade’s long war against Ukraine.
In today’s geopolitical context, Victory Day has been systematically weaponized by the Kremlin. It links the moral prestige of defeating Nazism in 1945 to justify Russia’s criminal war against Ukraine, legitimize present-day aggression, and mobilize audiences at home and abroad. Transforming memory into an instrument of information warfare.
The event has taken place in Toronto since 2015, at Earl Bales Park where participants carry Russian Soviet-era flags and other symbols. For many in Toronto’s Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Georgian, and Finnish communities, these are symbols of pain, suffering and occupation and evoke memories of deportations, mass repression, executions, cultural erasure, and systematic ethnocide carried out under Soviet Russian rule.
In the early 1930s, millions died in Soviet occupied Ukraine through deliberate starvation during the Holodomor. In the spring of 1940 alone, tens of thousands of Polish soldiers, officers, officials, and members of the intelligentsia were executed by the Soviet Russian authorities. In Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, hundreds of thousands of civilians were arrested, deported, or killed. over 40,000 children were abducted from their homes and families, many never to return.
The millions who fled to Canada, and their families, carry with them the traumas of Soviet-era Russian terror. The display of Soviet Russian symbols is a deliberate effort to reactivate those traumas, whitewash Soviet crimes, and intimidate the victims of those crimes into silence.
No formal investigation has ever examined the records of former Soviet Red Army personnel who immigrated to Canada after the Second World War, including any potential involvement in Soviet war crimes or crimes against humanity.
Against this historical background, and in the current context of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, videos and photos posted to the official Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Facebook account clearly demonsrate that the 2025 event was led by Russia’s ambassador to Canada, Oleg Stepanov. He headed a procession through the park that concluded at a municipal community centre known as “Russia House.” There, hundreds gathered under Soviet and current Russian nationalist and war related symbols. A Toronto City Councillor, James Pasternak, appears in a
video posted to social media in which he calls the moment “a most awkward time with the war in Ukraine,” then speaks about Victory Day and the need to honour Soviet soldiers for ensuring that “freedom and democracy were preserved across the Western world,” without acknowledging the brutal occupation, repression, and ethnocide carried out by the Kremlin, the Soviet Red Army, and the KGB.
Europe and Canada mark the end of the Second World War on May 8 as a sober act of remembrance for a catastrophe enabled not only by Nazi Germany, but also by Stalin’s pact with Hitler, and the coordinated Soviet aggression that followed. The Kremlin has instead weaponized May 9, wrapping Putin’s imperial ambitions in the moral authority of 1945. That framing underpins a central disinformation claim used to justify the invasion of Ukraine: the false assertion that Russia is “de-Nazifying” the country. It is propaganda designed to justify war and to excuse atrocities committed against Ukrainians.
The exploitation of civic space for an event that glorifies both historic and present mass criminal aggression is extraordinary. Similar rallies supporting a regime responsible for Europe’s largest land war since 1945 would not be tolerated in most Western democracies. Yet in Toronto, not only has the event been hosted repeatedly, it has been granted use of a municipally managed heritage property inside Earl Bales Park.
“Russia House” operates from the John Bales House, an 1824 heritage farmhouse owned by the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and managed by the City of Toronto. According to a 2015 City staff report, the building is owned by the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and managed by the City of Toronto. In 2015, City Council approved a “below-market lease” to the Russian Canadian Cultural Heritage Foundation (RCCHF) at nominal consideration. The tenant was to cover operating costs, while the City anticipated approximately $200,000 in structural repairs over five years and acknowledged that the building’s 5-year market rent was estimated at roughly $128,000.
A dedicated, single-group community centre in a public park on such terms appears unusual. Toronto’s other diaspora community hubs underscore the contrast. The Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre operates from a privately owned, community funded facility, built and sustained through fundraising and member support rather than a city owned site. The Latvian Centre in Don Mills is likewise a community asset, owned and maintained by the Latvian Canadian community through its own institutions and resources. The Ukrainian community centre in Etobicoke similarly operates from premises secured and supported by the community, not from a dedicated building on municipal parkland. In each case, these organizations have done what most communities in Toronto do: they raise money, purchase or lease their own space, and carry the costs of maintaining it, rather than relying on exclusive access to city managed and taxpayer owned property.
RCCHF’s publicly available filings show modest revenues for years, including minimal tax-receipted donations. Then in 2023, it reported a den non-tax-receipted donation of over $300,000. Reported occupancy costs in recent years have been low (just under $10,000 in 2023) for a facility of that size.
Publicly available materials also show engagement with Russian state officials, including a published congratulatory letter from the Russian Consulate and documentation of consular representatives participating in events at Russia House.
While cultural expression should never be suppressed, when a municipally supported spaces become the stage for messaging led by a foreign official representing a state accused of war crimes and aggression, and wrapped in narratives central to that regime’s information warfare, legitimate questions must be asked.
Toronto must determine whether its civic spaces and public assets are being used for genuine community activity, or as platforms for foreign state influence operations operating in plain sight.