A recent government decision aimed at widening the use of the Ukrainian language has drawn the ire of Russia, but Ukrainian officials retaliated by saying it was necessary to do something to stop Russian’s continuing dominance over Ukrainian in Ukraine.
The row was prompted by a Feb. 1 meeting of the Presidential Council on Language Policy, which declared that the drive to use Ukrainian as the state language was ‘slowing down and becoming patchy.’ The council endorsed a draft Cabinet resolution aimed at improving the situation.
The resolution envisages monitoring the use of Ukrainian as the language of record-keeping in central and local governments, testing the language proficiency of officials at various levels and ensuring that TV and radio stations allocate the required time for programs in Ukrainian. The Cabinet must sign a corresponding order for the measures to go into effect.
Official Russian reaction to the proposed measures was swift and negative. The country’s human rights commissioner, Oleg Mironov, characterized limitations on the use of Russian by public officials as a ‘gross and blatant violation of civilized relations between peoples and an infringement on the basic rights and freedoms of citizens.’
The Russian Foreign Ministry said the government’s plan was meant to ‘marginalize and possibly squeeze out the native [Russian] language of the majority of Ukrainians.’
The draft government resolution on wider use of Ukrainian was approved following a Dec. 16 ruling by the Constitutional Court, which confirmed Ukrainian as the compulsory means of communication for public officials, especially in central and local government bodies.
The ruling came in response to lawmakers’ request to explain a provision in the Constitution stating that ‘Ukrainian is the state language in Ukraine.’
The Constitutional Court ruled that Russian and other languages of ethnic minorities in Ukraine could be used by regional authorities along with Ukrainian within the limits to be defined by law.
It also said that Ukrainian must be the language of instruction at all educational institutions, with languages of ethnic minorities allowed to be used and studied along with Ukrainian in the communities of these minorities.
The lawmakers’ request to the Constitutional Court was prompted by the preparation of a new bill on language in parliament, approval of which is needed to bring the current Soviet-era law on language in line with the Constitution.
Since independence, the central government has gradually promoted the use of Ukrainian among its mostly Russian-speaking officials in Kyiv and regions. But the enforcement of language directives was not systematic and encountered strong resistance especially in the country’s Russian-speaking Crimean peninsula and in the east. As a result, Ukrainian has been slow to catch on among the large percentage of Ukraine’s population whose first language is Russian.
According to government data, Ukrainian-language books account for a mere 10 percent of the country’s book market, while only 18 percent of TV programs and 25 percent of newspapers in circulation are in Ukrainian. In public libraries, 62 percent of books are in Russian, while some 57 percent of Ukrainian university students study in Russian.
Citing these figures, Ukrainian officials criticized Russia’s latest language accusations as groundless and as an attempt to meddle in Ukraine’s internal affairs.
‘In terms of language, Ukraine still remains a sort of subsidiary of Russia,’ writer Volodymyr Yavorivsky, of the Presidential Council on Language Policy, said in an interview with the daily Den published Feb. 15.
Nina Karpachova, parliament’s human rights commissioner and Mironov’s Ukrainian counterpart, said she had not received a single complaint regarding discrimination against the Russian language since a Ukrainian-Russian agreement on cooperation in human rights protection entered into effect a year ago.
‘[Russia’s] Foreign Ministry and the federal institution for human rights protection have exceeded their authority and intervened in the internal affairs [of Ukraine],’ Karpachova said in a statement.
She said the Russian-speaking community in Ukraine had enough opportunities to speak its native language and preserve other forms of its cultural identity.
There are about 5,000 Russian-language schools in Ukraine for which teachers are trained in 20 universities, 14 state theaters stage performances in Russian, while 34 national and regional cultural societies function in Ukraine to promote Russian culture, Karpachova said.
‘At the same time, there is not a single school, theater, library, newspaper, magazine or TV program for millions of Ukrainians residing in Russia,’ her statement read.
