Fewer and fewer Ukrainians speak Russian, and monuments are being dismantled, but some warn that the “language of hate” has taken over, writes Al Jazeera.

Removal of all Russian

The de-Russification of Ukraine proceeded at breakneck speed throughout the war.

Hundreds of streets, squares and other places named after Russian figures have been renamed throughout Ukraine, and hundreds more will receive new names based on the results of online voting.

Plaques with the names of ethnic Russian writers, artists and scientists who visited, worked or lived in Ukraine have been removed – or will be removed soon.

The statues will be demolished, and resistance to their removal is sporadic.

The mayor of the southern city of Odessa said he opposes the removal of a bronze effigy of Russian empress Catherine II, who founded the city, which became one of the most cosmopolitan centers of tsarist Russia, similar to Lebanon’s Beirut or Egypt’s Alexandria.

“Even if the monuments are removed, history does not change,” Gennadiy Trukhanov said at the end of August.

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The public school curriculum no longer includes works by Russian authors, and books written by Russian citizens can no longer be published.

No song or music written or performed by Russians could be played in public – which was already dangerous, as street musicians who performed them were often beaten.

Only the Security Service of Ukraine can allow Russian-language performances or publications at the personal request of artists or authors, after their forced exposure of “Russian aggression”.

This measure – along with the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic crisis caused by the war – contributed to the financial collapse of many bookstores.

“We are on the verge of bankruptcy,” Vadim, who owns one of the few remaining shops in the Petrovsky Book Market in northern Kyiv, told Al Jazeera.

He supports de-Russification, but believes that its radical pace is not always positive.

According to him, specialized books translated and published in Russia are often the only way Ukrainian scientists or doctors can learn about new developments.

The Ukrainian entertainment industry also suffered.

Billboards with announcements about concerts of Russian rock and pop stars in Kyiv are still there, but their shows have been canceled permanently.

Several Ukrainian artists who moved to Russia and support the war were put on the “black list” of the country.

Hundreds of pro-war Russian celebrities were also blacklisted and banned from entering Ukraine. Russian films and series have disappeared from cinemas, but illegal downloads still dominate, as well as Russian translations of new Western films.

Reruns of classic Soviet films, which have become part of the culture of older Ukrainians, were also banned.

The Russian language before and after the invasion

Oleksiy Savchenko stopped speaking his native language on the day of Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

“Before the invasion, I was Russian-speaking,” the former businessman told Al Jazeera in Ukrainian.

Since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and supported separatists in Donbas, he has headed the SOS Army, a non-governmental organization that provides the Ukrainian military with precision targeting software.

But, despite his anti-Moscow position, Savchenko continued to use Russian in everyday life.

He was born and raised in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city with a pre-war population of 1.5 million, not far from the Russian border, and remained Russian-speaking.

But since the beginning of the invasion on February 24, Russian forces have bombed Kharkiv almost every day, killing hundreds of civilians and driving thousands from other places.

Kharkiv is located in the upper part of the Russian-speaking crescent of Ukraine, which consists of its eastern and southern regions.

The rest of Ukraine has a significant Russian-speaking population, including in the capital, Kyiv, where Savchenko now lives, and where Russian is still heard far more often than Ukrainian.

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Disequilibrium

The linguistic balance between Ukrainian and Russian, two related languages, has changed dramatically over the past decade.

In 2012, 40 percent of Ukrainians considered Russian their mother tongue, while 57 percent considered Ukrainian their primary language, according to data from the independent sociological institute Ratings Group.

A month after the invasion began, a staggering 76 percent of Ukrainians said Ukrainian was their mother tongue, and only one in five said they still spoke mostly Russian, a sociological institute reported on March 25.

According to him, a third of Russian-speakers have declared that they intend to switch exclusively to Ukrainian.

Ukraine is also home to dozens of ethnic groups, including Hungarians, Romanians, Roma and Crimean Tatars, whose languages ​​are recognized and protected as “native”.

“Adherence to Russia was determined not by the language of communication, but by everyone’s political views and the influence of propaganda, correlating with the level of support for pro-Russian parties,” the authors of the survey concluded.

This reasoning also applied to Savchenko, who had criticized Russian policy for years but still spoke Russian until he could not bear to speak the language of the invading forces.

Putin’s speech deepened the guilt

After Russian President Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, the “protection of the Russian language” became the reason for dozens of diplomatic clashes with the former Soviet states and the West.

Moscow has repeatedly complained to the UN, the European Union and international bodies about “violations” of the rights of Russian-speaking residents of the Baltic states in Central Asia.

But Ukraine has been at the center of Moscow’s linguistic concerns, and Putin has repeatedly stated that Russians and Ukrainians are not two different ethnicities.

“I will never renounce my belief that Russians and Ukrainians are one people,” he told Russia’s Security Council on March 3, a week after the war began.

“I consider the wall that has appeared in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between parts of an essentially unique historical and cultural space, as a big common problem, as a tragedy,” Putin wrote in July 2021 in a long article that angered Kyiv , reports Al Jazeera.

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