Ksenia Golubytska will be the first to admit that starting a business was not quite the escape plan she imagined.
“At that moment I was an English teacher and had been teaching a lot at university back in Donetsk where I’m from and a number of language schools,” she says. “At some point I got overwhelmed with teaching a lot – which I did being a workaholic – so I decided that I’d start my own language school and would not have to work anymore. A typical mistake of a newly made entrepreneur! Surprise, surprise – after I started Language Lab I had to work much more!”
That school, Language Lab, is now one of the more unusual educational institutions in Kyiv: a language school operating in a capital city at war, teaching Ukrainian to students online around the world.
A new kind of student
Before February 2022, the picture looked quite different. Foreigners moving to Kyiv who wanted to navigate daily life mostly chose to learn Russian. It was, as Golubytska puts it, the more practical option – widely understood across the region, and commonly used in the city itself.
Then the full-scale invasion began, and almost overnight, that changed.
“Right after the full-scale invasion began, this shifted dramatically,” she says. “Almost every new request we received was for Ukrainian. It felt like a very natural and meaningful change. Many of our students told us they wanted to show respect and solidarity with Ukrainians. And interestingly, locals responded to that – they were more open, more welcoming, and connections formed faster.”
The school’s student body today reflects that shift. Aid workers, journalists, diplomats, heritage speakers reconnecting with their roots, and people who describe themselves simply as drawn to the country and its culture. Some are based in Kyiv; many more are studying remotely from elsewhere in the world.
What genuinely surprises Golubytska, she says, is how many foreigners have chosen to come to Kyiv in person – despite everything. “I find that incredibly inspiring,” she says. “It says a lot about their courage and commitment.”
Holding together under blackouts
Running a school during wartime has meant adapting in ways Golubytska could not have anticipated. On the question of staff mobilization, Language Lab has been largely spared – almost the entire team is female. Air raids are harder to plan around, but have become, in her words, “part of a ‘normal’ routine for those in Ukraine.”
Last winter’s blackouts were something else.
“Blackouts last winter were really hard for the mental state both of the team and our students,” she says. “But to hold up we tried to support each other as much as we could – starting with organizing various in-person and online meet-ups and events, as well as teacher trainings and simple human conversations.”
That phrase – simple human conversations – carries weight coming from a language teacher. In a context where so much has been disrupted, the act of talking, of staying connected, became its own form of instruction.
What the world gets wrong
Ask Golubytska what she wishes the world understood about Ukrainian, and she does not hold back.
The first misconception she names is the most common: that Ukrainian and Russian are essentially the same language, or close variations of each other. The linguistic reality, she argues, is far more nuanced.
“Ukrainian is an independent language with its own history and development, and it is much less similar to Russian than many people assume,” she says. In terms of vocabulary, Ukrainian is actually closest to Belarusian, and shares more in common with Slovak, Polish, and Czech than with Russian. By one measure, around 38% of Ukrainian vocabulary differs from Russian – a gap considerably larger than most people realize.
But Golubytska’s account of the language goes beyond linguistics. The perceived similarity between Ukrainian and Russian, she argues, was not simply a product of geography or shared history. It was deliberately engineered.
“During the Soviet period, Ukrainian was deliberately reshaped to look more like Russian,” she explains. “Indigenous vocabulary was pushed out of dictionaries or labelled ‘archaic’ and ‘colloquial,’ while Russian-calqued alternatives were declared the official norm. Entire dictionaries from the 1920s were banned and destroyed. This wasn’t linguistics – it was policy.”
The suppression, she notes, predates the Soviet era. In 1876, Tsar Alexander II signed the Ems Decree, banning Ukrainian-language publishing, the import of Ukrainian books, and theatrical performances in Ukrainian. Thirteen years earlier, an imperial circular had declared that “a separate Ukrainian language never existed, does not exist, and shall not exist.”
When Ukrainians experienced a cultural renaissance in the 1920s – producing literature, art, and scholarship that flourished briefly after years of repression – it was brought to a violent end. The writers and intellectuals of that generation became known as the Executed Renaissance. By 1938, of the 259 writers who had been published in 1930, only 36 were still permitted to publish. The rest were shot, sent to labor camps, or disappeared.
“This was not cultural decline,” Golubytska says. “It was erasure by design.”
Learning as an act of solidarity
Against that history, the surge of interest in Ukrainian since 2022 takes on a different meaning. For Golubytska, it is not simply a trend or a market shift. It is something closer to restoration.
“What Ukrainians are doing today – reclaiming words, reviving native vocabulary, insisting on their language – is not nationalism,” she says. “It is restoration.”
And for those outside Ukraine who are considering learning the language, she has a message that is less about practicality than about something harder to quantify.
“Consider learning Ukrainian,” she says. “Not because it is easy, or because you may ever need it, but because choosing to learn a language is one of the most human ways to say: I see you. I take you seriously. You are here.”
At Language Lab, that message has clearly found an audience – in Kyiv, and far beyond it.