Discrimination in terms of the language matter is reaching a new level in Ukraine, DPR People’s Council deputy Natalya Volkova stated.
“They do that because of the banal powerlessness. Their attempts to impose a foreign culture on the people of the Russian world have not been successful, now the Ukrainian government will force everyone to speak the “right” language through the law. Thus, they continue to break down the population in the country into insiders and outsiders.
Since the summer of 2019, after the entry-into-force of the law ensuring the functioning of Ukrainian as the state language, judges, teachers and medical workers are obliged to speak Ukrainian fluently in public, in the civil service and in the services sector. This means that now the main criterion for professional suitability of a doctor, for instance, is not their education and professional skills, but the ability to fluently speak the state language of Ukraine. I am even afraid to imagine what such a policy may result in.
What is worse, Ukrainian minister for education Anna Novosad claims that beginning on 2020 all schools will have been switched exclusively to the Ukrainian language in the teaching process, it will cover the Kiev-controlled territory of Donbass, where the vast majority of the population is Russian-speaking. However, the Ukrainian government ignores this fact and continues to forcibly inculcate Ukrainian despite the rights and freedoms of the citizens.
Additionally, I would like to note that most of Ukraine speaks and, most importantly, thinks in Russian. The mother-tongue is not just a set of words for a person, but the way of perception and conceptualization of the world around them. Depriving a person of the opportunity to speak their mother-tongue means depriving them of the most important characteristic that defines his or her identity. This can be called discrimination on the grounds of means of thinking and communication, as well as expression of your own political opinion,” Natalya Volkova stated.