Myths and Misconceptions about the Language Situation in Ukraine

One of the reasons put forward by the Russian leadership for their military intervention in Ukraine, both in 2014 and 2022, was the alleged discrimination against Ukraine's Russian-speaking population, who they presented as clearly distinct from the Ukrainian speakers, as strongly identifying with their primary language, and as unanimously opposed to the Ukrainian state's policy of "forcible Ukrainianization". Unfortunately, these and other tenets of Russian propaganda have been internalized by many Western journalists, politicians and even academics, who rely on them to question the legitimacy of Ukraine's language policy and thus, often inadvertently, support Russian accusations used as a pretext for military intervention. The purpose of this lecture is to show that these and similar beliefs are simplistic, distorted or outright false, and to describe the actual language situation in Ukraine and its change over the decades of independence.