A History of Suppression

Ukrainian was indeed suppressed for centuries. Under the Russian Empire of the tsars, the Valuev Circular (1863) denied its existence as a language and forbade its use for religious and educational texts. The Emsky Decree (1876) went further and erased it from public print and performance. In the Soviet period, after a brief policy of korenizatsiia (“indigenization,” nominally meant to empower non-Russian nations and regain their trust), the Ukrainian cultural revival was branded as “bourgeois nationalism” and the language became confined to a narrow niche. Russian, on the other hand, was promoted as the language of interethnic communication across the Soviet Union, dominant in knowledge production, politics, and culture.

After independence in 1991, the status of the Ukrainian language hardly improved outside its strongholds in the west of the country. Officials often struggled to use it — and the joke went that the surest way to dodge a fine was to speak Ukrainian, as the police wouldn’t know how to answer. Ukrainian survived as a symbolic marker in alternative culture and civil society circles, while in daily life, it could be ridiculed as the language of “uncultured peasants.”

Interestingly, my first proper job after graduation was at airline Lufthansa in the Czech Republic. Following Euromaidan, they suddenly decided to hire Ukrainian-speaking telephone operators; before that, passengers from Ukraine had only Russian or English options. That says a lot about how “visible” Ukrainian was until very recently.

History explains the anger and sensitivity. It also explains why language policy for some has become an important marker of sovereignty. But it cannot justify reproducing the logic of exclusion in reverse.

Dramatic Shifts

In a striking irony, the Kremlin’s “protection” of Russian has backfired. Between 2015 and 2024, the share of Ukrainians who supported removing Russian from official communication tripled to two-thirds. The change accelerated after 2022: now nearly two-thirds name Ukrainian as their primary home language, too; Russian dropped to 13 percent. The share who think Russian should not be studied at all jumped from 8 percent to 58 percent. Were Moscow ever to succeed in imposing official recognition of Russian, the likely backlash might be even harsher. Yet the alarmist rhetoric goes on as if Ukrainian were on the brink of extinction.

This treatment of language as a security matter is no longer just a cultural mood. It is the law. While the constitution guarantees the free development and use of Russian and other languages associated with national minorities, and prohibits linguistic discrimination, in 2021, the Constitutional Court declared Ukrainian “the code of the nation,” ruling that Russian speakers — because they understand and can use Ukrainian — do not constitute a distinct sociodemographic group. They were defined instead as a political construct, produced by decades of Russification, and thus lacking a basis for collective protections, such as those that might apply to other minorities like Hungarian speakers.

Legislation reinforced this framework. The Law on the State Language restricts minority-language education to European Union languages. The Law on National Minorities explicitly excludes the right to use a minority language if it is the state language of an aggressor or occupier. The speaker of the Verkhovna Rada (parliament), Ruslan Stefanchuk, explained that “if a people commits aggression, its rights must be curtailed.” The minister of education agreed: opportunities for equal development “categorically” do not apply to the language “used as a weapon.”

Officials are nearly competing to push things further. A former language ombudsman recalled soldiers “shooting on hearing Russian” at the front and described Ukrainian as our “friend-or-foe identification.” His successor demanded banning Russian songs because “in wartime, stages and streets are spaces of meaning” reserved for “the language of the spiritual strength of the Ukrainian people.” An education ombudswoman outright suggested that teachers should refuse to understand pupils who speak Russian.

Cultural figures amplify the message. A well-known actor proposed whipping kids for using Russian. An established writer called for monitoring playgrounds and reprimanding parents of Russified children. A popular blogger boasted that she instils such a negative attitude toward Russian in her offspring that they might beat peers of theirs who speak it.

A study by the civic network OPORA shows how this rhetoric permeates media ecosystems. In leading Telegram channels, Russian-speaking Ukrainians are frequently portrayed as a cause of the invasion, as bearers of foreign culture, as potential collaborators, as remnants of the Soviet past. Vilification is the new common sense. This is no longer fringe. It is a new orthodoxy.

Who Pays the Price?

Who are these people who keep using Russian — what one ISLND TV segment called “the language of the underclass,” “a sign of low intelligence”?

The costs fall most heavily on those already made vulnerable by war. Russian was most widely spoken in the South and East, i.e., the exact regions devastated by invasion and occupation. Millions displaced from these areas face severe economic and social hardship. Surveys by the International Organization for Migration indicate that displaced households are disproportionately elderly, female, and caring for people with chronic illness or disability.

Yet instead of solidarity, these Russian-speakers encounter suspicion. Internally displaced families are accused of “bringing the occupier’s language” with them; calls arise to create “language inspections.”

Treating language as a proxy for loyalty misidentifies the real threat. It hardly helps mobilize citizens for a broad national project when their everyday beliefs and practices are written out of “the body of the nation.” It fosters disengagement or quiet sabotage — and offers Moscow a propaganda gift.

Russian-language Telegram channels already circulate narratives of harassment and betrayal, framing Russian-speaking Ukrainians as a persecuted group forced to surrender their identity and accumulating hatred toward “unbalanced” language activists. Online one often reads calls to exempt Russian speakers from military duty — “If we’re not Ukrainian, why should we fight or stay here under bombs?” Yet duty seems more universal than respect.

It also creates obstacles to any future reconciliation. As the Ukrainian left-wing group Sotsialnyi Rukh noted in a 2022 post, Russian remains a language of millions of Ukrainians, including those fighting Russian imperialism, and denying people the right to their mother tongue only alienates a large part of society. And if there is no legitimate way to speak up for themselves, why wouldn’t they vote for a political entrepreneur who promises to do it for them — deepening polarization? Any dissatisfied and excluded minority is a liability not only in war but also when it comes time to rebuild.

I remember this from Sloviansk, where I worked before leaving for studies abroad, the city whose capture by pro-Russian militias marked the beginning of the armed conflict in 2014. Local “decolonization” warriors — often with more cultural capital, some avid fans of blood-and-soil banners — wouldn’t miss an opportunity to lecture that everyone must speak Ukrainian in their presence and every street name must be “decommunized” as soon as possible.

In a town with a crumbling industry, an aging population, and high unemployment, it did not win support but rather hardened resentment. The quiet majority shrugged and kept voting for whichever fragment of the old Party of Regions, the dominant force in the Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine before Euromaidan, was on the ballot. What was framed as liberation came across as moralizing imposition.

The logic doesn’t stop at language; it is expansive. One of the Orthodox churches is denounced as “subordinated to Moscow” despite its statutes. Memory politics follows the same pattern: in July, Lviv authorities dismantled a Soviet World War II memorial, exhumed the remains of 355 soldiers, and offered to exchange them for Ukrainian prisoners of war. Purism moves easily from words to graves.

Worst of all, it is unlikely to be of any help. If Vladimir Putin decided tomorrow to crown himself an Orthodox tsar and protector, even a prompt en masse conversion to Catholicism wouldn’t stop him. He could simply call it another plot of Western puppeteers to brainwash what he still calls a “brother nation.”

Decolonization or Essentialism?

The justification for this state of affairs is a demand for “decolonization.” Correcting inequalities, guaranteeing the development of the Ukrainian language, and empowering its speakers — these are legitimate goals. But is this what’s happening?

Culture is not a buried essence waiting to be dug out. It is plural, alive, messy. However, the contemporary “decolonization” vogue treats it otherwise: something to be purified, cleaned of imperial traces, and narrowed into a single mold — an excuse to teach the ignorant “the truth,” to demand repentance, confession, and reeducation. In practice, this rhetoric simply refits ethno-nationalist claims in progressive language for Western audiences.

Preoccupation with historical narratives at the expense of real people’s lived experiences makes these “decolonizers” resemble the imperial logic they oppose. The fact that Ukrainian speakers once felt marginalized does not entitle them — or those acting on their behalf — to harass others today. No Ukrainian wins from replacing one exclusion with another.

Survival for What?

So here we are: Russian-speaking Ukrainians bombed by Russia, distrusted and pushed away at home, squeezed between hammer and anvil. One invades, the other excludes. But a project that narrows its people to survive cannot liberate them; it can only redistribute fear. So we must ask: If survival demands this, what is it we are surviving for?

The alternative is neither imperial assimilation nor nationalist essentialism. It is a political project grounded in democracy and pluralism — not as decoration but as the only way solidarity can be real. Otherwise, the more we “purify” ourselves, the less of ourselves there will be left to defend.