Demonstrations in support of the Russian and Ukrainian languages are being held on Thursday opposite the building of Kharkiv Regional Council.
An Interfax-Ukraine reporter said that about 20 people were participating in the first demonstration and up to 100 in the second. The participants in the rallies are separated by a police cordon.
The communists are rallying in support of the Russian language. They are holding party flags and posters with the inscriptions “Nationalism – No! Russian language – Yes,” “Let’s Protect the Right of Residents to Use Russian,” “Bilingualism – A Guarantee of the Unity of the State”, “Russian Should Be Granted the Status of a Second Official Language.”
“The Communist Party has for 20 years called for granting Russian the status of a second official language. We are not against the Ukrainian language. But we want people in Ukraine to speak the languages convenient for them,” said a participant in the demonstration, Vitaliy Shelekhov.
Representatives of the Batkivschyna Party, Svoboda, Our Ukraine and civil society activists are against the submission for consideration by Kharkiv Regional Council of the question on the implementation of the provisions of the law on the principles of state language policy. They are holding party and national flags and posters with the inscriptions “Article 10 of the Constitution of Ukraine: Ukrainian is the State Language in Ukraine,” “Kharkiv Region Supports the Ukrainian Language,” “No to Separatism,” “No to Language Split in Ukraine.”
“We know that today it is planned to submit to a session of the regional council the question on the implementation of the law on the principles of state language policy, which has not been included in the agenda from the very beginning and passed only through commissions. We are here to say ‘no’ to what will happen there,” protester Mykola Pakhnin said.
