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Comment by int_19h | Hacker News Reader

Russian language isn't banned anywhere in Ukraine. Indeed, 5 minutes of combat footage from the Ukrainian side will quickly show that the majority of their armed forces speak Russian.

Even Russians themselves reflected on this, noting that most volunteer forces they have faced so far come not from the Western (majority-Ukrainian-speaking) regions of Ukraine, but rather from Kharkiv, Dnipro etc. Their explanation is that all those people are "brainwashed by Ukrainian Nazis".

There is some real contention with the status of Russian as 1) the official government language, and 2) the official education language in schools. But I don't think it's fair to phrase that as "banning Russian".

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It is illegal to have government communication in Russian or to have a Russian language radio station in Ukraine. I would call that banning Russian language from some aspects of public life.

Do you have a link for this? I hadn't heard about the Russian language being banned. I did know about this from 2019:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-parliament-langua...

"The new legislation requires TV and film distribution firms to ensure 90 percent of their content is in Ukrainian and for the proportion of Ukrainian-language printed media and books to be at least 50 percent."

It also says civil servants must speak Ukrainian. It does not say they can't also speak Russian.

In any case, that's not a ban.

It is illegal for any business to offer services or communicate in Russian unless the customer explicitly asks. It is illegal to have Russian language newspapers or schools, all of which existed before the crackdown.

Turkey has done the same thing to Kurdish speakers and most of the West has rightfully condemned their attempts to crack down on the language.

It's legal to use Russian as the primary instruction language in schools for the first 5 years. After that, they have to switch to Ukrainian, but they can still continue to teach Russian as a foreign language class (same as English etc).

On the whole, I'd say that Ukrainian language policies are more akin to Quebec. OTOH Turkey has been packing its prisons with Kurds until recently for crimes such as "insulting Turkishness", so no, it's not really a valid comparison. I don't like the laws on this subject in either Ukraine or in Quebec (or really any place that tries to force cultural cohesion), but specifics do matter.

And anyway, the Ukrainian population did take those steps when most of them voted for a political outsider from a Russian speaking background seen as sympathetic to Russian speaking culture and somewhat willing to negotiate better relations with the "independent Republics". Putin interpreted that as a sign of weakness...

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