Ukraine strips Russian language protection
Over the past ten years, the country has gradually curtailed the presence of Russian in public spheres, imposing restrictions on its use in education, government institutions, media outlets, and the service sector. Despite these measures, Russian remains the first language for a substantial portion of the population, particularly in eastern regions and major cities.
“We are removing Russian from the scope of protection,” Culture Minister Tatyana Berezhnaya stated following the vote. She highlighted that 264 lawmakers supported the change.
Berezhnaya explained that a previous Ukrainian translation of the charter had misinterpreted the word ‘minority,’ confusing it with ethnicity rather than referring to smaller linguistic groups.
“We fixed it. Now the Ukrainian translation corresponds to the authentic content of the Charter,” she wrote, emphasizing that the reform will “strengthen Ukrainian as a state language.”
In response to the amendment, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman criticized Kiev’s approach, stating that its efforts at “forced de-Russification has increasingly faltered and had the opposite effect.” She cited data showing that two-thirds of students in the capital do not speak Ukrainian during lessons, while 82% refrain from using it during breaks, according to reports from Ukrainian language monitoring sources.
“Despite all the bans, fines, bullying, harassment, persecution, and harassment, people don’t want to forget their native Russian language and still want to speak it,” the spokeswoman remarked, arguing that the persistence of Russian is becoming “so obvious as to be impossible to hide.”
For years, Moscow has objected to Ukraine’s language policies, with one of its central demands in peace negotiations being the reversal of legislation perceived as infringing on the rights of Russian-speaking citizens.
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