The war, which has been raging in the east of Europe for four years, has its paradoxes, incomprehensible to outsiders.
Most Ukrainians defending the country from Russian invasion speak Russian. The eastern and southern lands of Ukraine, bombed, captured and plundered by the Russian army, are traditionally Russian-speaking.
Meanwhile, among the many conditions Moscow is putting forward to end the war are the demands that Ukraine respect the rights of the “Russian-speaking population” and grant Russian official status.
What’s the logic here? Common sense? And why does Zelensky seem so adamant, when acclaiming: “We have a state language — Ukrainian. Russia can say whatever it wants… I believe these demands are purely meant to impose ultimatums and complicate the negotiation process.”
The language of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky has become a time bomb
This is not simple stubbornness. Not an innate hatred of Russian, which Zelensky spoke all his life before becoming president of Ukraine. This is an understanding of the fact that the language of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky has become a time bomb.
In the spring of 2014, Putin began his hybrid war against Ukraine under the pretext of protecting the Russian-speaking population of Crimea and Donbass. In conquering new territories in 2022, he used the same semantic battering ram. For him, language is not a matter of culture, linguistics or anthropology. It is an ideological weapon.
In Ukraine, we do not have a developed film industry, our TV companies are low-budget, our book market has shrunk and is going through hard times. Ukrainian culture, suppressed for years by tsarism and communism, is rarely competitive in the world. This makes us vulnerable to the giant stream spewed out by the Kremlin propaganda machine. Every careless mind that absorbs the endless flow of Kremlin narratives becomes an unwitting carrier of hostile ideology. Quarantine is not repression; it is survival. Vaccination means building our own culture strong enough to resist infection — a difficult, almost impossible task in wartime.
The Western press is full of criticism of the Ukrainian government, which bans Russian Orthodox churches, demolishes monuments to writers from St. Petersburg and Moscow, renames streets, and bans Russian songs from the airwaves. In the enlightened, peaceful, and prosperous West, this may seem like a violation of democratic values. In reality, it is simply a natural defence mechanism.
There is a saying in Russia that says: “When you live with wolves, you have to howl like a wolf.” Ukraine does not want to be a member of a pack. It also does not want to be prey for wolves. That is why the demands put forward by President Putin, the Foreign Minister, or anyone else in Moscow are unacceptable here.
The language itself is not a problem – millions of Ukrainians still speak Russian, and I do not know of a single case of administrative prosecution for this. It is not the linguistics that is important, but the meaning. Russian propaganda sows hostility, hatred, lies. Protection from this is natural, like protection from infection. Ukraine is defending itself not only on the military front, but also on the cultural front.
Before the “Russian World” invasion of my native Donbass, I never spoke Ukrainian. Afterwards, this has changed radically.
Having settled in Kyiv, I spent a year or two in a mental split, learning not just to speak but to think differently. But I was physically unable to read Russian books and watch Russian films. They carried a tone of chauvinism and arrogance that became unbearable. It was like a 19th-century Indian reading Kipling.
You may say: just a matter of time and place. Certainly. It is naïve to think that Goethe and Beethoven were popular in the countries invaded by Hitler’s troops. Why would Putin’s aggression have had a different effect?
On the eve of the full-scale war, about half of Ukraine was Russian-speaking. Today, that figure has decreased by half.
Putin, who nurtured the idea of transferring the “Russian World” to the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, suffered an ideological fiasco. He himself is already aware of this. This is confirmed by the brutal shelling of cities whose streets still bear the names of Tchaikovsky, Pushkin and Chekhov. Moscow is no longer flirting with Russian speakers. It is killing them.
On September 1, school began in Kyiv, and while walking in the morning, I heard snatches of conversations between children and their parents. Among them, there was one that stuck in my memory. A mother asked her little daughter to be especially careful today, because “Russians always launch rockets on holidays.”
Can you guess what the first-grader answered? “I know,” that’s what she said quietly.
It’s unlikely that her worldview changed the next day, spent by Ukrainian schoolchildren in bomb shelters. They know and understand everything — no matter what language they use.
