You're reading: Yuschenko calls new language law ‘strategy for de-Ukrainization’

Third Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko (2005-2010) has said he believes that the adoption of the language law indicates that the country is being offered a strategy for de-Ukrainization.

“We are being offered …a plan of Russification, in which the
national language is not needed. Finally, we are being offered a
strategy for de-Ukrainization,” he said at a forum of patriotic forces
in Kyiv on Saturday.

He described the adoption of the law on principles of state language policy as “mockery and cynicism.”

“If you want to preserve Ukraine, first of all, preserve its language,” Yuschenko said.

He also said that there are no pauses in politics: “If you give up
the European course, you will get Moscow’s policy, dependence on Moscow,
from which our humiliation and the loss of our independence always
comes.”

Yuschenko said that all Ukrainian values in Ukraine were “subject to anathema.”