The Russian language in post-Soviet Ukraine by Olga Sukharevskaya, a former Ukrainian diplomat If you go to Ukraine and walk through the streets of Kiev, Vinnitsa, Chernigov, or Kharkov, it may seem like you’re in Moscow or Rostov-on-Don, as the majority of the people in these cities speak Russian. At the same time, Ukraine is a country with one of the harshest language law regimes in the world. Russian, which is spoken by the vast, vast majority of the country’s population, is almost de jure banned there. How did this happen? You can, but you can’t One of the favorite phrases of Ukrainian nationalists is the sarcastic: ‘Who says you can’t speak Russian? Until 2019, when the law ‘On Ensuring the Functioning of Ukrainian as the State Language’ was adopted, this sarcasm was partially justified. Officially, Ukrainians were obliged to speak Ukrainian, but, in fact, they spoke whatever was convenient for them. And no one paid much attention, at least in the first couple of decades of indep