Members of the Public Humanitarian Council under the president of Ukraine have spoken out against "legalizing Russian as a second state language in Ukraine" and demanding that President Viktor Yanukovych express his position on the language law.
In particular, the Ukrainian people’s artist and art director at the
Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater, Bohdan Stupka, and Hero of
Ukraine and well-known poet Ivan Drach are ready to quit the Public
Humanitarian Council in protest against this law.
“Through this bill, the ruling Regions Party is making an attempt
against the most sacred value of the Ukrainian people – its language.
The Ukrainian language is constitutionally enshrined as the sole state
language in Ukraine, while the provision of regional status to the
Russian language and 17 other minority languages is nothing but an
attempt to legitimize the Russification of Ukraine,” Stupka and Drach
said in a statement to the president.
They said they believe that nothing poses a threat to the Russian
language in Ukraine. Protecting the Russian language like this is
endangering the existence of the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian
statehood, the authors of the appeal said.
“The Ukrainian people will not tolerate this and will demand that the
Ukrainian president, as guarantor of the Constitution, put an end to
the unconstitutional actions of the Regions Party, which, together with
the communists, is trying to continue the communist policy of Ukraine’s
Russification,” reads the statement.
They also asked Yanukovych, as head of the Public Humanitarian
Council, to urgently convene a meeting of the council and express his
position on this law.
