Born in Crimea and raised in Kherson, journalist Yevheniia Virlych grew up speaking both Ukrainian and Russian in her daily life. It wasn’t until 2022, when she and her family lived through the Russian occupation of Kherson Oblast, that they made the definitive choice to abandon speaking Russian altogether.
“It has become unacceptable to speak the language of the Russians who occupied, killed, and continue to kill our people,” Virlych told the Kyiv Independent. “We lived through it, and we felt it too deeply to not Ukrainize now.”
While Ukrainian is the official state language, many Ukrainians speak Russian, a consequence of centuries of Russification under the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
For the majority of them, speaking Russian is not an expression of allegiance to Russia. But for the Kremlin, the Russian language has become an increasingly powerful propaganda tool, used to portray Russian-speaking Ukrainians as signaling a desire to join with Russia.
Moscow has been actively pushing this narrative abroad, with U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff most recently using it to justify why Ukraine needs to make territorial concessions to Russia.
"They are Russian-speaking, and there have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule," Witkoff said in a recent interview with right-wing political commentator Tucker Carlson, referring to the Russian-occupied regions of eastern and southern Ukraine.
Virlych, like many Ukrainians, was upset to hear a U.S. official echo a Russian talking point — though she was not surprised.
“(Former U.S. President) George H. W. Bush, just weeks before Ukraine gained independence, essentially denied this right to Ukrainians in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament). Again, under the influence of Soviet leaders who told him about the ‘dangerous’ nationalists (in Ukraine),” she said.
“Nothing has changed. Russia is very skilled at lying and using propaganda, and it knows how to work with it.”
As the war continues, discussions in Ukrainian society about the pace of Ukrainization have intensified, prompting a reckoning with the centuries-long efforts by Russia to suppress Ukrainian culture.
Destruction of Ukrainian culture in Russian Empire
Over 22 million native Ukrainian speakers were recorded in the first and final census conducted by the Russian Empire in 1897. The census recorded individuals by language rather than ethnicity, so it doesn’t count Ukrainians who might have identified their native language as Russian.
For many of them, their family histories would include stories of living under serfdom and being faced with laws designed to restrict access to Ukrainian-language materials.
“There never was, is not, and cannot be any separate little Russian language,” declared Russian Interior Minister Pyotr Valuyev upon issuing the Valuyev Circular in 1863, which effectively banned the publication of books and education materials in Ukrainian in the Russian Empire.
The term "Little Russia" has historically been used by Russia as a derogatory label for Ukraine, portraying it as a lesser but inseparable part of Russia. This term reflects a colonial mindset, diminishing Ukraine's distinct cultural, political, and historical identity.
Tsar Alexander II went on to issue the Ems Ukaz in 1876, which imposed even stricter limitations on the Ukrainian language. Under this decree, the import of Ukrainian books from abroad was banned, and both original works and translations in Ukrainian could no longer be published. Additionally, the performance of plays and the holding of public readings in Ukrainian were expressly prohibited.
One key Ukrainian cultural figure who defied these efforts was 19th-century poet and artist Taras Shevchenko. He wrote extensively about the injustices the Russian Empire inflicted upon the Ukrainian people. For his outspoken views, Shevchenko was arrested in 1847 and sentenced to 25 years of forced military service in exile.
Vissarion Belinsky, one of the Russian Empire’s top literary critics of his time, outright dismissed Shevchenko’s work as being of literary quality, writing to a friend in 1847 that “common sense reveals Shevchenko to be an ass, a fool, a vulgarian, and moreover, a total drunkard, not to mention a horilka-drinking lover of Ukrainian patriotism,” using a Russian slur rather than the word Ukrainian.
In reality, Shevchenko’s work modernized the Ukrainian language – but this is an achievement that threatened the Russian colonial project.
Some of his writing focused on the Ukrainian Cossacks, a military society of free men whose downfall symbolizes some of the Russian Empire's earliest efforts to conquer Ukraine.
In 1654, the Ukrainian Cossacks entered into the Pereiaslav Treaty with the Russian Empire, seeking security guarantees against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. However, their trust was betrayed, setting the stage for centuries of fraught relations between Ukrainians and Russians. This betrayal eventually led to the collapse of the Cossack Hetmanate and the Russian imposition of serfdom, into which Ukrainians like Shevchenko were later born.
Mass deportations and purges in Soviet times
World War I led to the collapse of the Russian Empire, giving Ukraine a chance to declare independence in 1917. However, the Bolsheviks saw Ukraine as crucial to their Soviet project and fought to keep it under their control. After several years of war between Ukrainian forces, the Bolsheviks, and other competing factions, Ukraine was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1922.
The Soviet Union sometimes promoted cultural and linguistic diversity under the idea of a “friendship of peoples.” However, controlled periods of “Korenizatsiya” (Indigenization) were replaced by Russification policies that led to tragic consequences.
This includes the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, which are estimated to have killed as many as over one million people across the Soviet Union.
During this period, the Soviet secret police targeted over 200 members of Ukraine’s intelligentsia, who were subjected to arrest and, in some cases, execution. Though some were committed Communists, they believed Ukraine's cultural identity should align more with Europe than with Moscow. This group came to be known collectively as the Executed Renaissance — a generation of artists, writers, and intellectuals whose creative potential was cut short by the Soviet regime.
The Soviets also carried out mass deportations, including Operation West in 1947, which was specifically meant to crush the Ukrainian liberation movement in western Ukraine. Thousands of Ukrainians from Lviv, Volyn, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Chernivtsi oblasts were forcibly relocated to remote parts of Siberia and Kazakhstan.
Major cities across Ukraine gradually became predominantly Russian-speaking. Like other urban centers in former Soviet republics, these cities attracted people from other regions.
“After World War II, cities, enterprises, and infrastructure that had been completely destroyed were rebuilt by workers from across the USSR. Their common language was Russian, as it was deliberately positioned by the Soviet authorities as the ‘language of interethnic communication.’ However, all of this, of course, did not make these regions entirely pro-Russian,” Volodymyr Rafeyenko, a Ukrainian writer from Donetsk who switched to writing entirely in Ukrainian after 2022, told the Kyiv Independent.
“Language is indifferent to national and political self-identification. It is not the language that makes the choice — it is the person.”
The Kyiv Independent
Soviet education was also aimed at promoting a greater use of the Russian language. Although some Soviet schools offered Ukrainian and other non-Russian languages, teachers were often paid less than their Russian counterparts. General education courses were conducted in Russian.
All this led to a stereotype promoted in Soviet society, as it was during the Russian Empire, that Ukrainian was somehow “inferior.”
“As Russian was predominant in the cities and Ukrainian in the countryside, the latter was widely perceived as the language of villagers, and since they were widely perceived to be less accomplished, less refined or even less intelligent than urbanites, speaking Ukrainian in the cities was stigmatized,” Volodymyr Kulyk, a political scientist at the Kyiv School of Economics, explained to the Kyiv Independent.
Any public celebration of Ukrainian culture revolved around the notion that this was a language of the village and ultimately meant to be seen as kitsch — in other words, something that could never be as “highbrow” as Russian culture.
While Russian language and culture dominated much of life in Soviet Ukraine, some Ukrainian artists continued to speak out despite the personal risk it posed to them, believing in a future where their people could live freely and express their cultural identity without fear of reprisal. The Ukrainian intelligentsia who rejected the Russification of their culture were targeted by Soviet authorities well into the final years of the Soviet Union.
Artist Alla Horska (1929-1970), known for incorporating Ukrainian folk traditions into her work, repeatedly corresponded with and supported dissidents after their release from prison, making her a target of state repression. In 1970, she was found murdered, killed by a hammer blow to the head. While authorities blamed her father-in-law, many believe the Soviet secret police orchestrated her death.
Another prominent Ukrainian dissident, poet Vasyl Stus (1938-1985), who spoke out against the Soviet regime and was arrested on more than one occasion for the so-called crime of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” eventually perished in a brutal Russian penal colony in 1985.
Wartime changes
Ukraine officially gained independence in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, establishing Ukrainian as the sole state language. As a result, institutions like schools and bureaucratic offices started conducting day-to-day activities in Ukrainian. Yet, despite this shift, many Ukrainians continued speaking Russian, a lasting habit shaped by centuries of Russian rule.
Russia sought to maintain close ties with Ukraine during this period — an effort that, in retrospect, many see as an unwillingness to accept Ukraine’s sovereignty. Moscow began backing pro-Russian political parties that fueled societal division in Ukraine and openly opposed initiatives like closer integration with Europe. In the lead-up to Ukraine's 2004 presidential election, Russian President Vladimir Putin even visited Ukraine twice to throw his support behind Viktor Yanukovych, Moscow's favored candidate.
Meanwhile, Yanukovych's opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, was poisoned in an attack widely believed to have been orchestrated by Russia's security service. When Yanukovych was declared the winner of what many believed to be a rigged election, Ukrainians flooded the streets in protest, sparking the Orange Revolution.
Ukrainian began to be spoken by more people after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it was not until the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution (also known as the Revolution of Dignity), followed by Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and its invasion of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, that the state began actively promoting the use of the Ukrainian language.
In 2019, the Ukrainian government passed a law "on ensuring the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language."
Contrary to some deliberate misinterpretations, the law was not designed to prohibit the Russian language in Ukraine, but rather to mandate a broader use of Ukrainian than Russian across the public sphere. The Russian language was noticeably still a part of everyday use in Ukrainian society.
“EuroMaidan and the Russian aggression of 2014 undermined that stereotype (that Ukrainian was somehow inferior to Russian) but did not immediately eliminate it. While the stronger promotion of Ukrainian after 2014 helped overcome the marginality of Ukrainian, it was only after 2022 that it became fully accepted as a legitimate language of all spheres of urban life and the predominant language of the public domain,” Kulyk explained.
70% of Ukrainians across the country now speak exclusively or primarily in Ukrainian at home.
Since the start of the full-scale war, Russia has devastated multiple cities in Ukraine’s east, occupied up to 20% of the country, kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children, and subjected Ukraine to relentless missile and drone strikes on a near-daily basis. This war has affected all Ukrainians to varying degrees of severity, and amid this suffering and Russia’s pre-text of “protecting” Russian speakers, Russian-speaking Ukrainians are increasingly faced with the choice of the language they use.
“Many people have thus come to believe that the only means to deprive Russia of the ability to make such a claim (that they are ‘protecting’ Russian-speaking Ukrainians) is to simply stop speaking Russian,” Kulyk said.
“Those people who fail to do so are considered to be playing into Putin’s hands.”
Anna Belokur
A spring 2014 survey by the sociological group Rating found that 56% of Ukrainians opposed granting Russian official state language status following Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.
A survey conducted in 2024 by the sociological group Rating revealed that 70% of Ukrainians across the country now speak exclusively or primarily in Ukrainian at home. In 2015, this number stood at 50%, and in 2006 at 46%.
While some Ukrainians may still speak Russian with their friends or families at home, an increasing number choose to speak exclusively in Ukrainian in public. They might also choose to speak exclusively in Ukrainian with younger family members — the choice of how much or how little to speak Russian during wartime is deeply personal and varies by individual circumstances.
“Russian occupation starts with the Russian language.”
Debates continue in Ukrainian society about the pace of this language shift. Recent comments, such as those made by Witkoff, have made many believe these changes should happen more quickly.
“If you don’t want to change, to rid your language and identity of Russianness, you will soon hear such statements about Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, and even Kyiv. Change now, while 80% of the territory is still ours thanks to the Ukrainian army. Otherwise, you risk losing even more. It’s not too late to change, even now,” Ukrainian poet and soldier Yaryna Chornohuz wrote on Facebook on March 23 following Witkoff’s comments.
For Ukrainians like Virlych, who lived through occupation and were liberated by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, there is a deep understanding of what is at stake. She finds inspiration in her fellow Khersonians, who live under daily Russian attacks and say that they will survive whatever comes their way “as long as there is no more occupation.”
“And these are people who endure intense shelling 24/7,” Virlych said.
“Nothing is more terrifying to them than (another) Russian occupation, and Russian occupation starts with the Russian language.”
Note from the author:
Hey there, it’s Kate Tsurkan, thanks for reading this explainer. To be honest, it always seemed like common sense to me why some Ukrainians speak Russian but then again, I’ve been living here for many years. The most important thing when it comes to topics like the choice of language in Ukraine is to listen to Ukrainians themselves. I hope this explainer conveyed to you that speaking Russian, once again, does not signify a pro-Russian allegiance. Rather, it is a signifier of what some Ukrainian families had to do to survive. If you like reading this sort of thing, please consider becoming a member of the Kyiv Independent.
