Opinion

Language as a Weapon

Juliette Marquis | Multimedia Editor

Iwas born and spent the majority of my childhood in the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv. Lined with giant boulevards, monuments, cathedrals, and parks stitched together by cobblestone streets, the 1,500-year-old city is known as the cradle of Eastern Europe.

The city of Kyiv, the place of my birth, is now under siege by Russian missiles. What led to this warfare? History shows that Russia has used the presence of the Russian language in Ukraine as a pretext for bloodshed.

In the era of the Soviet Union, all fifteen Soviet Republics spoke one tongue, Russian. Russian was my own birth language and the only one I speak from my native country. Although each territory had its own ethnic language, the goal of the communist party was to whitewash all ethnicities by making them all Soviet people. Russian was exclusively used in schools, courts, businesses, and every form of media.

Furthermore, the Soviet Union’s absolutist approach to Russification created a culture of rebellion within its republic, who wanted to hold onto their own unique heritage.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was a need for Ukraine to reclaim its national identity. The country abruptly switched to Ukrainian as its official language, enshrined officially in the 1996 Ukrainian constitution, making the Russian community within Ukraine a minority overnight.

Born in the capital of my country, I find myself on the outside by not being able to speak Ukrainian. It appears that language has now been tied to identity as those that chose to speak either Russian or Ukrainian are choosing a political side.

To address the competition between the two languages, in Aug. 2012, former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, passed a new law on language policy, the Brookings Institute reported. The law stated that if 10% of a population’s native tongue is a minority language, notably Russian, it will be made the official language of that region. The Brookings Institute noted that 24% of Ukrainians, mostly living in the east and south of the country, reported Russian as their native language, splitting the country along linguistic lines.

Up until this point, all decisions in regards to culture and national identity were carried out through the constitutional system. Russia was able to influence Ukraine’s leaders in what served the Russian Federation best.

That all changed on Nov. 20, 2013, when tens of thousands of Ukrainians protested against Yanukovych's refusal to sign a long-negotiated trade agreement between Ukraine and the European Union. The decision revealed that Yanukovych was less concerned with the best future for Ukraine and more of a puppet to the Russian Federation. The demonstrations devolved into deadly violence as Yanukovych’s police force tried to extinguish them.

After three months of fighting, the Maidan movement, which later came to be known as the Revolution of Dignity,

ousted the Ukrainian parliament Yanukovych from his presidential position on Feb. 22, 2014 with new elections set for May of that year.

The Revolution of Dignity marked a turning point for Russia to take ownership of the vulnerability in the foundation of Ukraine’s identity. Positioning himself as the protector of the Russian-speaking population, Putin overtook Crimea, Ukraine’s southern peninsula on March 18, 2014. Appearing on his state television that evening, Putin stated that, in 1991, ”millions of people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former Union republics, while the Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be

Starting Feb. 25, Nataly Tzaganok, along with his wife and two children shelter in the basement of their Kyiv apartment building for 11 days while Russian missiles are heard overhead. March 7, the family evacuated to poland. Photograph submitted by Nataly Tzaganok.

divided by borders.”

Crimea is part of the Russian Federation to this day. At the core of their membership is their Russian-speaking majority, a weak link Putin exploited to expand Russia’s Empire.

Less than a month later, in April 2014, Russia-backed separatist rebels seized government buildings in the majority Russian-speaking Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Proclaiming the region as a “people’s republic,” the separatists voted to become independent from Ukraine and part of Russia.

Without accepting the separatist’s motion, Putin instead supplied weapons and ground support to the majority Russian-speaking Donbas region with what came to be known as “little green men.” These soldiers were not Ukrainians, but they refused to openly identify as Russians, giving Putin plausible deniability that they were acting on behalf of Russia.

On April 24, 2019, Putin signed a decree simplifying procedures for the Russian-speaking residents of the eastern districts of Ukraine to obtain Russian citizenship, which had by this point been embroiled in a six-year Russian-backed military conflict. The decree stated that Russia had “humanitarian goals'' of preserving the “rights and freedoms of a person and citizen.”

In a statement by the E.U. leadership, member states declared that Russian passports issued to Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Donbas would not be recognized as they were viewed as “an attack on Ukrainian sovereignty.”

Over the next two years, Russia's Interior Ministry said that more than 527,000 Russian-speaking people from Eastern Ukraine have been granted Russian citizenship. All these historical flashpoints set the stage for the war in Ukraine today.

On Thursday, Feb. 23, Putin delivered a speech on Russian state television officially recognizing the separatist claims of the Donbas region. Citing the need to protect his country’s new citizens, who are all Russian speakers, living in Ukraine. Putin invaded the country with brute force. Sending missiles across the entire region, Putin warned that outside countries should not interfere in the armed assault or risk “consequences you have never seen in history.”

Relegated to just helplessly watch these events unfold from the safety of my Los Angeles home makes me feel ashamed that things were allowed to get this far.

Dismantling a nation’s language, that identity which often unifies a society, bankrupts a nation’s culture and erodes its sense of self determination. Witnessing Ukraine’s tragic circumstance reminds me just how fragile stability and integrity is of the places we call home. How in the face of brutality, sometimes the only thing left to do is speak up.