Thomas De Waal, Carnegie Europe: New Fighting in Ukraine’s Language War
If Kyiv draws new battle lines in the country’s language war, Moscow is ready to restart its side of this conflict.
"I have no desire to become a soldier in this war of words,” Ukraine’s best-known novelist Andrei Kurkov wrote in 2012. He was reacting to the furor over a law instituted by former president Viktor Yanukovych that elevated Russian to the status of a regional language in Ukraine.
Kurkov writes mainly in Russian but was a supporter of the Maidan protests of 2013 that overthrow Yanukovych and turned Ukraine towards Europe. His was a plea to keep language politics out of the conflict between Moscow and Kyiv.
Unfortunately that plea is unheard and Ukraine’s language wars are restarting. A bill requiring 75 percent of national television broadcasts to be in Ukrainian has just been passed by the Rada. It follows a very unpopular move by President Poroshenko to ban Russian-language social media websites, such as Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: In the eastern part of Ukraine .... Russian is the dominant language .... and it has been the case for centuries. But the Ukraine government has now gone all out to restrict and ban Russian, starting with President Poroshenko banning Russian-language social media websites, such as Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki. But this pales when compared to Kiev's restrictions on the use of the Russian language in the school systems. This alone has created an enormous amount of ill-will and resentment .... adding only more fuel to the separatist cause. If all of these additional anti-Russian measures are passed into law by the Ukraine government .... which I predict they will .... Russia will not have to restart its side of this conflict .... the Ukrainian-Russians will be doing it themselves.
Update: Ukraine and Russia have started a Twitter war .... Ukraine-Russia Twitter spat over origin of queen escalates to meme warfare (ABC News Online).