President Volodymyr Zelensky once again dismissed the Kremlin’s claims that Russian-speaking Ukrainians are discriminated against on Wednesday, suggesting that Moscow may be stalling to avoid peace talks.
As per Ukrinform, Zelensky told journalists that Ukrainians “already have a state language – Ukrainian,” and would not adopt Russian as a second official language.
“Russia can say whatever it wants… I believe these demands are purely meant to impose ultimatums and complicate the negotiation process.”
The president appears to have been referring to comments made by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in an interview with Russian state media on Tuesday, in which he falsely claimed that Ukraine has implemented “a total ban on the Russian language.”
The law on language
In 2019, then-President Petro Poroshenko introduced a law “on ensuring the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language.” Although the use of minority languages in Ukraine (including Russian) are protected under the Ukrainian constitution, the law was designed to promote the use of the Ukrainian language in the public sphere – including in administrative settings, media, education, and customer service.
According to the Ukrainian government, the “primary task” of the law is to eliminate discrimination against the Ukrainian language, which has undergone centuries of linguistic suppression by the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union.
The question of language in Ukraine remains controversial. Iryna Farion, an ultra-nationalist linguist and former MP, died after being shot in the head on a Lviv street last year. She had previously sparked outrage by suggesting that Ukrainian soldiers who speak Russian are not “true patriots.”
“The Russian-speaking population”
The Kremlin has long used claims that Russian-speaking Ukrainians are discriminated against as a pretext for Russian aggression. Days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian leader Vladimir Putin said that Russian-speakers in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions were facing “genocide,” as per The New York Times.
The idea that Russian-speaking Ukrainians are being persecuted by Kyiv relies on the idea that there is a distinct “Russian-speaking population” in Ukraine, with a different identity, different beliefs, and different interests to their Ukrainian-speaking peers. The reality is more complex.
According to a 2024 survey, 58% of Ukrainians report usually speaking Ukrainian at home, as opposed to 9% who said they usually speak Russian. However, a further 31% of Ukrainians report speaking both languages at home.
Laada Bilaniuk, a researcher at the University of Washington, previously identified at least five different variants of surzhyk, a kind of linguistically distinct combination of Ukrainian and Russian.
Some polls also indicate that the use of the Ukrainian language has increased as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Regional divisions?
In Russian propaganda narratives, to speak Russian is to be Russian. The Kremlin often uses the presence of Russian-speaking Ukrainians to justify its claims on Ukrainian territory – referring to great swathes of territory, all the way from Odesa in the far southwest to Kharkiv in the far northeast, as Novorossiya, or New Russia.
“Odessa is a Russian city. We know this. Everyone knows this,” Putin proclaimed in 2023, as per Russian state media.
Although it’s true that Russian is more widely spoken in eastern and southern Ukraine than it is in the north-western and central parts of the country, these generalizations obscure far more than they reveal.
Sasha Pavlenko, a humanitarian worker from Odesa, regularly delivers aid to de-occupied areas of the nearby Kherson region. The villagers she meets, even in regions such as Kherson, which are traditionally considered Russian-speaking, often speak Ukrainian.
Soviet-era policies of Russification focused primarily on cities and industrial centres, stigmatizing the Ukrainian language as backwards and peasant-like. Immigrants from Russia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union were also more likely to head to larger settlements where they could find work.
“If you go to any region of Ukraine to the villages, you’ll find that most people speak Ukrainian or surzhyk still, because it survived in the villages,” she said.
“Cities are easier to control. The smaller the village is, the more likely it is to be Ukrainian speaking.”
Russia’s foreign minister also claimed that the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine are denied their right to practice their religion – presumably referring to a bill banning religious organizations with links to Russia signed into law in September 2024.
Conversely, reports have emerged from Ukraine’s occupied territories of religious minorities being tortured and killed by the Russian occupational regime, according to The Economist. Zelensky said last year that Russian forces had killed 50 priests and destroyed roughly 700 churches in the occupied territories since the full-scale invasion began, as per Pravda.
Also on Wednesday, Zelensky reiterated that he is willing to meet with Putin.
“And if the Russians are not ready for this – we ask for tariffs. We ask for additional sanctions, tariff steps from the US, because this will really work.”