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Kiev has been tightening restrictions on the use of Russian, despite it being the native tongue of many citizens
A Ukrainian language czar has sounded the alarm over its position in the country, despite the government’s aggressive Ukrainization campaign. Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Ukraine has largely been a bilingual nation, with most citizens able to speak or understand both Russian and Ukrainian, particularly in the eastern half of the country.
People are still unsure which language they consider to be the “main one” for them, Kiev’s Commissioner for the Protection of the State Language Taras Kremin has stated, adding that its use has been in decline, particularly in schools.
“The Ukrainian language has actually become less common among both children and teachers,” the language commissioner told Espreso TV on Thursday, urging the Education Ministry to take swift measures to tackle the issue.
According to Kremen, local authorities in various parts of the country are also in no rush to comply with government restrictions on the use of language. “Dozens of our local council members still have not learned three elementary words in Ukrainian,” the official said, adding that the local authorities “react quite poorly” to the “Ukrainization” process.
In 2019, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law requiring Ukrainian to be used exclusively in nearly all aspects of public life, including education, entertainment, politics, business, and the service industry, obliging all Ukrainian citizens to know the language. The move severely limited the use of Russian, effectively banning it in such fields as education and media.
In 2024, Kiev maintained that Ukrainian children still did not have a good enough command of their state language as they were still using Russian in their daily lives. According to Kremen himself, a third of children in some Ukrainian regions preferred to speak Russian.
In October, the language czar hailed what he called a transition from a “gentle” Ukrainization campaign to a “fervent” one. Kiev was to impose “strict control over compliance with the language law in all spheres of public life on the territory of Ukraine,” he said at that time.
On Thursday, the official admitted that Ukrainians “still doubt which language is the main one for us, which is the state language” decades after gaining independence.
After the 2014 Western-backed coup in Kiev, Ukraine’s new authorities abolished Russian as an official regional language and started suppressing it, prompting a backlash from Russian-speaking residents in now former Ukrainian territories, which was one of the reasons they rejected the post-coup government.
