Is Russian language forbidden in Ukraine?

Russia claims that Russians in Ukraine are oppressed, because their language is forbidden. Is that true? Short answer — no it is not. If you want to know details, please read further.

Russian language usage in Ukraine

Russian language is mentioned in a Ukrainian Constitution in Article 10. It says:

In Ukraine, the free development, use and protection of Russian and other languages of the national minorities of Ukraine is guaranteed.

On an official presidential website Russian language is offered together with Ukrainian and English. If you go to most of the Ukrainian websites, Russian is one of the languages to choose from (Ukrainian and English being the most usual two other choices).

There are lots of Ukrainians speaking Russian on a daily basis (about half of population, 18% monolingual, 32% bilingual), even though majority considers Ukrainian be a mother tongue (76%). Maybe shockingly to the Russian propagandists, Azov regiment members often use Russian language as well.

Where the myth of Russian language being forbidden originates from?

Language law cancellation in 2014

Most likely this is because of the cancellation of a language law right after the Euromaidan in 2014.

There was a law (named Kivalova-Kolesnichenko) from 2012, which allowed to officially use a minority language regionally. It was written in such way, that de facto Russian language would become an official language in most, if not all, parts of Ukraine. The lower limit for the “minority language” to become officially regional was set to 10%. This would almost always include Russian language, and almost never — any other.

This law sparked lots of controversy and when Yanukovich flee, one of the first actions taken was to cancel the law. Cancellation of the law was mostly pushed by the right-wing party “Svoboda”, which, by the way, got only 6 places in parliament out of 450 in the next elections. Law cancellation, which simply brought the situation back to where it was before 2012, was depicted by Russian media as a “Law was passed to forbid Russian language”.

Ukrainian language preferences

There are some other laws which were passed to protect Ukrainian language. Why so? Ukrainian language is a mother tongue for most of the Ukrainians, but many Russian speakers traditionally live in the cities. This brought a situation when television and press was mostly Russian, since it was created in cities, so Russian language was overrepresented in Ukraine. Russian-speaking market is also larger, because it obviously also includes Russia, so Ukrainian language was not so favoured.

One of the laws was to introduce quotas for radios and TVs, so that part of the content had to be Ukrainian. Other law required to print Ukrainian versions of magazines, because the majority of the magazines were exclusively in Russian. There was a law which required service personnel to use Ukrainian if a customer wishes so (before that they could simply continue using Russian) or that websites should show Ukrainian interface by default etc.

These were clearly laws to protect Ukrainian language, not the laws to forbid Russian. However because most of the content was indeed in Russian, this could be portrayed by Russia as an oppression of a Russian language.

Russian invasion 2022 influence

There is a new trend in a language situation in Ukraine. Russian language was predominantly used in the Eastern and Southern cities of Ukraine, best examples being Kharkiv, Odesa and Mykolayiv. And it’s particularly these cities which Russia bombs the most. There is no wonder that Russian speaking Ukrainians from those regions started switching to Ukrainian or expressed this wish. According to the RatingGroup research — 60% of bilingual Ukrainians say that they will switch to exclusively Ukrainian in the near future.

Some of the Ukrainian websites stopped offering Russian language after the Russian invasion.

Conclusion

There are literally no laws which would specifically forbid Russian language, there are only laws which provide quotas or preferences to the Ukrainian language. The cancellation of a Kivalova-Kolesnichenko law in 2014 was not forbidding Russian language. There are lots of Ukrainians speaking Russian even in Ukrainian army.

With Russian aggression in 2022 many Ukrainians decided to move away from Russian language, so the biggest enemy of a Russian language in Ukraine is Russia itself.