You're reading: Media experts: Russian language losing ground in post-Soviet space

The Russian language is losing its hold on the former Soviet republics as disintegration processes gain momentum, Russian TV presenter Svetlana Sorokina believes.

"In the past several years I have been to several republics of the former Soviet Union: Uzbekistan, Georgia, Ukraine, Armenia. It is interesting to see the Russian language slowly going. (…) If young people can understand Russian, they can barely speak it," Sorokina said on in Astana on Tuesday during a videoconference entitled "Role of Mass Media in the Creation of the Eurasian Union".

"The Russian language used to unite our countries. If young people stop to speak it, we will be even more divided than we are now. I do not know what to do with this," she added.

The Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Kazakhstanskaya Pravda newspaper Sergey Nesterenko does not rule out the possibility that in the future English may become the international language in the Eurasian Union.

"In Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Belarus there are no problems with Russian unlike in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and the Baltic states. It may well be that someday English will become the international language in the Eurasian Union," he said.

"But if the Eurasian Union is limited to the countries currently fluent in Russian, there will be no need in English," Nesterenko said.

Meanwhile, head of the TV and radio station of the president of Kazakhstan Erlan Bekhozhin believes the problem of the Russian language in the former Soviet Republics is not acute.

"Will Russian be one of the leading languages of the world? I think it already is a world language," Bekhozhin said.