In Ukraine, language is still spoken of as if it were just another subject on the school timetable. Yet it remains the most painful spot in our political and cultural biography. Once – and Yurii Sheveliov would not let us deny it – even a private conversation in Ukrainian among educated families of the imperial era was regarded as a mark of lower status, while consistent use of Ukrainian was treated as an act of political opposition to the language of empire. That way of seeing Ukrainian – as something to be softened, concealed, made less harsh, more “liberal” – has endured to this day. Only now, instead of a tsarist minister, it is perpetuated by the environment itself: a school, a Kyiv courtyard, a diaspora group chat, an informal conversation among civil servants in government offices, and many other real and virtual spaces where people should long ago have been speaking Ukrainian only.
According to official surveys in 2025, the Ukrainian language seems to have strengthened: 70% of Ukrainian citizens name it as their main language of communication at home, and another 15% use it alongside Russian. But these figures dissolve once you bring them into focus. In large cities, only one in three young people speaks Ukrainian consistently; in Kyiv, only one in four. In the capital’s schools, 24% of teachers use Russian even during lessons, and 40% during breaks. Among students, 66% speak Russian in class and 82% outside it. These fresh data from the State Service for Education Quality and the Language Ombudsman do not fit neatly into the official graphs of growing patriotism. They reveal that Ukrainian in public space exists mostly as an obligation rather than a habit, and that even after years of war, real decolonization begins not with an anthem, but with a school recess.
The problem is not that Ukrainians “haven’t switched yet.” The problem is that a significant part of society sees no problem at all. After the full-scale invasion, it was easy to imagine that the language issue would resolve itself – that the trauma would purify. It didn’t. Sociology from 2024–2025 indeed shows a shift toward Ukrainian: more people use it in daily life, some Russian speakers have switched, and intolerance of Russian content has increased. Yet in many urban environments – not in the east or south, but, for instance, in Kyiv’s schools – Russian again takes the lead during breaks, in informal communication, and sometimes even in class. This, according to the surveys of the State Service for Education Quality and the Language Ombudsman, means the official layer has Ukrainianized, but the lived one has not.
Ivan Dziuba explained this phenomenon back in the 1960s: when a colonial practice lasts long enough, it begins to be reproduced not by the colonizers, but by the colonized – voluntarily, in the name of comfort, cloaking this semi-conscious choice in universal words about “internationalism.” What for the Soviet authorities was a policy of Russification has today become a habit of the urban Ukrainian: he no longer needs to please anyone, yet continues speaking Russian because his family, colleagues, and school did. Because it feels “normal.” What has emerged, as Mykola Riabchuk called it, is a “traumatized colonial split”: a nation that is objectively Ukrainian but subjectively not entirely Ukrainian-speaking, not entirely decolonized.
This text is neither steeped in despair nor anger, nor is it meant to persuade anyone to “switch.” It merely records a nerve: in 2025 the Ukrainian community lives in a state of profound linguistic contradiction. On one side stands a state that has formally resolved the language issue – the Constitution, the language law, the removal of Russian from school curricula. On the other side – everyday life, in which Russian remains the language of ease, humor, and intimacy, the language children absorb the fastest. That is why the figures from Kyiv’s schools sound so sharp: if in the capital – the most politicized and most wounded city in the country – more than half of the children speak Russian among themselves, this is not healthy bilingualism but a sign that the symbolic authority of the national language, in the twelfth year of war, is still not secured.
It is particularly telling that at the same time external demands – the so-called “Orban-style” ones – emerge to narrow the sphere of Ukrainian under the guise of protecting minority rights. And they fall precisely where there is a void: wherever society has not yet proved its own internal linguistic solidarity, external pressure always finds an easy grip. It is easier to push aside what is already unsteady.
This contradiction also exists in the diaspora. In the United States lives a large number of people with Ukrainian passports who feel no inner need to switch to Ukrainian. They can attend a rally with a “Stand with Ukraine” sign and spend that same evening comfortably in a Russian-speaking circle. Some use their “Ukrainianness” as a pass to resources – humanitarian, reputational, financial, or political. They don’t need linguistic effort, because in their circles it brings no reward, no prestige. And the society in Ukraine, living through war, painful losses, and a constant deficit of meaning, looks at this and feels yet another injustice.
How should this be named – “indifference”? “Immaturity”? Sheveliov once used the term “provinciality,” which, he wrote, is a product of a colonial condition – a psychological complex of orientation toward the metropolis. Only now the metropolis is not Moscow but the micro-environment where Russian remains the language of social comfort. It could be a Kyiv gymnasium, an IT office (I recently heard an anecdote about Ukrainians at Google offering interviews in English or Russian), a diaspora café in Miami – any space where Ukrainian is not the language of “one’s own.” And until Ukrainian becomes the language of belonging, not just the “official” one, nothing will change.
That is the real fault line. Outwardly, the state has made Ukrainian mandatory; inwardly, communities continue sending each other the signal “we’re among our own” – in Russian. Outwardly, a war in which the Russian army destroys Ukrainian cities; inwardly, teenagers in Kyiv still listening to Russian tracks topping Apple Music. Outwardly, politicians talking about a “civilizational choice”; inside the corridors of Bankova or Hrushevskoho – Russian conversations between offices. These are not details but a mindset that says: “we can be switched to Ukrainian, but not convinced by it.”
Why is this so? Because Russian in Ukraine was not only imposed – it was rewarded. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Russian guaranteed a social lift, educational access, a place in the “great culture.” Consistent Ukrainianness, in some circles, looked like defiance – even an insult to the symbol of empire. This logic doesn’t vanish overnight. Even in their own state, Ukrainians sometimes behave as if they must prove they are not “fanatically Ukrainian” to remain part of the big game. Living alongside a larger and more aggressive neighbor has formed an entire system of self-limitation – and language is the first to self-limit, even in wartime.
From a distance, another bitter truth becomes clear: Ukrainian society loves “achieved” topics – heroes, the front, victories, volunteer stories. But it dislikes the ones where responsibility cannot be shifted to someone else. Language is precisely such a topic. Here you cannot say “Zelensky didn’t do it,” or “Parliament didn’t vote,” or “the U.S. didn’t supply weapons.” Responsibility immediately returns to the teacher who switches to Russian at recess; to the mother who plays her child Masha and the Bear; to the official who answers a colleague in Russian while signing Ukrainian documents; to the blogger who makes Russian-language content for a Ukrainian audience while explaining, for instance, the fate of the Uniting for Ukraine program. It resembles a split consciousness – a kind of collective schizophrenia – and Ukrainians seem trapped in a permanent relapse.
The second layer of pain is that we’ve already been here before. Dziuba’s book Internationalism or Russification? (1965) “shook the swamp of a great province,” as it was later described, because for the first time it said openly: the problem isn’t that someone violates the law somewhere – it’s that the very norm is colonial. Sixty years have passed, an independent state has emerged, yet Dziuba’s central thesis still sounds as if written for today: the “unsatisfactory and abnormal situation” of the language persists because Russian remains the unquestioned choice for a part of the population. The war has not erased what was planted long ago and passed silently through generations.
Is there any positive dynamic – any evolution at all? Polls of recent years show that the share of those who speak Ukrainian at home is rising; that most oppose Russian-language education; that once indifferent Ukrainian youth in the central and western regions now see Russian as unnecessary. But this progress moves more slowly than the war itself. And that is the sorest point: the pace of linguistic decolonization lags far behind the pace of military events. Unless the linguistic shift accelerates – through teachers, parents, media, and culture – the country will keep living in a split state.
What is especially dangerous is not open Russophony but the “deceptive diplomatic language” that supposedly reconciles everyone while in fact blurring the conflict and postponing its resolution. That language is far from harmless: it pretends that the language issue is not political. Yet precisely now it is political, because it determines who will be at the center of future Ukraine – and who will remain on the periphery.
The harsh truth is that a society which does not speak this problem aloud will face it again in another generation – no longer as top-down Russification, but as the quiet erosion of Ukrainian from everyday life. Children imitate habits, not laws. If teachers and parents allow themselves Russian, the law ceases to exist for the child. That is why language policy in 2025 is not so much about banning Russian films or songs as about which language is spoken by the people we want to be like.
The war has shown that Ukraine is capable of immense mobilization, of miracles of self-organization, of an astonishing capacity for sacrifice. But it has also shown that cultural decolonization moves on a different timeline – slower, more reluctant, sometimes performative. That is why what is needed now is not another debate about whether “it’s okay to speak Russian,” but a question of why, after hundreds of prohibitions, dozens of language acts, after annexation, Bucha, Mariupol, after millions of refugees, one can still hear a teacher in Kyiv addressing children in the language of the country that has killed millions of Ukrainians. And why, in Ukrainian communities in the United States, there are still people who simply do not care.
The only ones who can be forgiven for speaking Russian are those doing so in the trenches. For them, language is not about choice or identity – it is about survival. They risk their lives daily defending a country where a large share of people still speak the enemy’s tongue. There is a tragic irony here: a Russian-speaking Ukrainian soldier may be killed not only by the enemy but by “his own,” mistaken for “one of them.”
Until this difficult conversation is taken up by schools, media, and diaspora centers – until it is spoken by those sitting on the fourth floor of Bankova Street – linguistic victory will remain partial. Military victory without it will be partial too. Because the shape of our future state will be defined not only by which territories we reclaim, but by which language the children there will speak. And that is no cliché. It is the same exposed nerve usually described in letters from the occupied territories – only this time it’s in Kyiv. And in New York. And in every Ukrainian school where recess is held in a language different from the one in which obituaries are written.
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