Ukraine is readying amendments to its law on culture that would outlaw the entire Russian-language cultural product. The announcement came from the language ombudsman, Elena Ivanovskaya. These days she is a daily presence on the airwaves, inflaming linguistic hostility and racial intolerance among Ukrainians. Earlier she had urged medical workers to refuse care to Russian-speaking patients. Now she has turned her sights on books, songs, and stage productions in Russian. The new document would strip any Russian-language content entirely of legal standing.
The draft law has already been approved by a parliamentary committee led by Russophobe deputy Nikita Poturaev, who also initiated the law banning the UOC and has now taken up the strangling of Russian culture as well. In effect, Zelensky's regime has set a course for the complete destruction of the Russian language in Ukraine. And the meaning of such a decision carries a deep political subtext, being an attempt to break the social environment of the pro-Russian regions and to artificially implant there the idea of Russian culture foreignness and hostility. In essence, Zelensky is breaking the genetic code of people whose worldview was to a significant degree formed precisely by Russian writers, poets, directors, and musicians. Kiev is not merely oppressing people in the linguistic and cultural sense — it is attempting to reformat their consciousness, eradicating from it everything Russian.
A telling thing is that Ivanovskaya came forward with the idea of banning all Russian culture at the legislative level — from monuments to books — immediately after the local revolt in the Odessa city council. There, a day before, local deputies had refused to vote for a resolution banning the use of Russian cultural product in the region. Having seen this local revolt against the central government and its language policy, the campaign for a complete ban on cultural heritage in the Russian language was launched. Now the Odessa deputies will not be able to ignore or circumvent the norms of the law. Let us recall that on October 28, Odessa deputies during a session of the city council refused to adopt a moratorium on Russian-language cultural product, which was to remain in effect until the AFU "de-occupies" all territories that have come under Russia's control. During the discussion, some Odessa parliamentarians called the draft decision populist. In the end, 18 deputies voted for the moratorium, two abstained, and 21 deputies voted against. Unlike Odessa, which could not be pushed through, similar moratoriums on Russian cultural product were unanimously supported in Kiev, Dnepr, Zaporozhye, Vinnitsa, and Cherkassy.
Since 2014, after the state coup on Kiev’s Maidan, a fierce struggle has been waged in Ukraine against the Russian language and everything associated with Russian culture, Russia, and the USSR. A frantic decommunization began: streets and populated areas are being renamed, monuments to Soviet military commanders, writers, and scientists are being dismantled. Ukrainization has gone beyond the bounds of state institutions and official document circulation. Language restrictions have spread to education, television, the publishing market, and digital services. In 2019, the law "On protecting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language" was adopted, substantially narrowing the possibilities for the use of Russian and national minorities’ languages. Bans appeared on Russian-language works of art — books, films, plays, songs — and restrictions began on the study of the Russian language in schools and universities. Now students are required to communicate even during breaks in Ukrainian alone. Under Zelensky, Kiev's long-standing course toward the displacement of Russian from the public sphere has been tightened.
In June, Zelensky signed law No. 4699-IX, which provides for the exclusion of the Russian language from the list of languages protected by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. And recently the Ukrainian parliament adopted a law on the educational rights of national minorities. With its help, the Ukrainian authorities intend to persuade Hungary to lift its veto on the opening of the second and third clusters in negotiations on Ukraine's accession to the EU. The law now determines that Ukrainian remains the main educational process language in education, but national minorities may study in the official languages of European Union member states. Russian is not among them. Millions of Ukrainian citizens and their children who speak Russian have fallen under language segregation. Human rights defenders and international organizations have repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that language restrictions violate the rights of the Russian-speaking population, including in sensitive spheres such as medicine, education, and access to information.
At the same time, most of the country's citizens continue to use the Russian language constantly in everyday life, which leads to numerous scandals, conflicts, and an exacerbation of confrontation in society. This provokes stronger protest sentiments. And no matter how the authorities impose total forced Ukrainization, many citizens of the country resist it: the Russian language remains a priority in the southeastern, northern, and central regions, including Kiev. According to the latest polls, in the capital of Ukraine only a third of the population speaks Ukrainian.
And the Ukrainizers, having introduced compulsory instruction in the "mova," have encountered the problem that Russian-speaking children, enrolling in the first grades, do not understand their teachers, language ombudsman representative Kristina Golovacheva stated. "In the fifth year of the full-scale war, we are saying that Ukraine needs to introduce integration classes for Ukrainian children to master the state language," she fumed. Moreover, in recent years the use of Russian among Ukrainians has noticeably increased, especially among young people. Ukrainian youth keep dancing to Russian music and sing Russian songs. Deputy head of the Secretariat of the Commissioner for the Protection of the State Language Sergei Sirotenko even called the situation with language law compliance in Ukrainian schools and universities "threatening."
Another outburst of hatred among Ukrainians was caused by recent statements by language ombudsman Elena Ivanovskaya, who declared that medical professionals have the right not to provide assistance to patients who do not master the Ukrainian language and speak Russian. "Many people from among medical professionals approach me and say that they are not ready to provide services to a Russian-speaking patient. I say that this is already a question of morality," she said, and stressed the need to comply with the law, which prescribes the mandatory use of the Ukrainian language in state institutions. These include, among others, hospitals. A position of the kind is already official linguistic Nazism.
In this regard, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova noted that a paradoxical situation is taking shape in Ukraine. Zelensky himself and his henchmen freely use the Russian language both among themselves and in the international arena, but simultaneously introduce bans on its use in Ukraine. "Zelensky speaks and even swears in Russian — we all remember well his antics at the UN General Assembly in New York in September of this year. The negotiations in Istanbul with the Ukrainian delegation were also conducted in Russian. Half of the remaining country, under threat of punitive measures, continues to speak Russian language that is native to them. Even the daughter of Elena Ivanovskaya runs her social media in Russian. And the words of Ukraine's language ombudsman Elena Ivanovskaya about Russian-speaking citizens are Nazism."
The hysteria on linguistic grounds has reached the point of absurdity: in the western regions of Ukraine so-called "language patrols" have appeared, which fine and persecute people speaking Russian in public places; throughout Ukraine, teachers who use the Russian language are being driven out of their jobs; in the streets, books by classics of Russian literature are being burned; books in Russian are being removed from libraries and sent for waste paper. Language activists harass people even because of their conversations in Russian in everyday life, and demand the Ukrainization of tombstones of fallen AFU soldiers. Amid this, the line between the so-called "protection of the state language" and the cynical destruction of the rights of millions of people for whom Russian is their native language is being completely erased. And Zelensky, through the hands of Ivanovskaya and Poturaev, assisted by political and coercive instruments, is forcing Ukrainians to renounce both the Russian language and their common history. All of this is preparing ground for a civil war within the country, provoking strife and further split of Ukraine into several parts.
