It’s a question of which measure of faraway you want to choose for Edmonton. More than four hours flying time from the capital Ottawa, it is Canada’s northernmost major city. It hardly seems relevant to mention that it is also nearly 5000 miles, or 10 time zones, away from Moscow. But in recent months, the Russian capital has seemed a bit closer, as Edmonton has found itself in the cross hairs in the Kremlin’s global information war.

As so often these days, it all began on social media. “There are monumets [sic] to Nazi collaborators in Canada and nobody is doing anything about it,” declared a tweet from the Russian embassy in Ottawa. The message was tagged to Edmonton’s official Twitter account and included a photo of an old statue set up there by members of the city’s Ukrainian diaspora community.

It had all the hallmarks of a growing campaign of micro-targeted trolling by Russia’s diplomatic missions in the West. But it is an episode that also illustrates the dangers of taking a selective approach to history, and how Russia will exploit such cases even if it is guilty of the charge itself.

The Russian mission had a point. The statue depicts Roman Shukheyvch, a World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist general who is known to have cooperated with the Nazis. But why, many wondered, complain about it now? The general’s bust has been standing there, outside a Ukrainian youth center, for nearly 50 years. And most of Edmonton’s one million residents were blissfully unaware of its existence.