Language As A Weapon

As the world watches the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, it's important to consider how things got this way.

I was 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 city was founded more than 1,500 years ago.

A dimly lit window of a Kyiv apartment building’s basement, which was turned into a shelter on Feb. 25, 2022. While Russian missiles are heard overhead, Ukrainian Resident Nataly Tzaganok, along with his wife and two children, shelter in place. (Photo by Nataly Tzaganok)

How did the strain between Russia and Ukraine escalate to the point of all-out war? One critical area of focus that must be examined is the culture of this region, and by extension, language.

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, as outlined by professor David F. Marshall from the Institute of Linguistics at the University of North Dakota, to fulfill “the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's goal of creating a non-ethnic Soviet people," Russian was exclusively used in schools, courts, businesses, and every form of media. However, Marshall adds, this "policy spawned a generation of cultural entrepreneurs, (who had) high resistance to Russification and integration became a major long-run problem for the Soviet Union."

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was a need for Ukraine to reclaim its national identity, said Ph.D. candidate Dominique Arel from Harvard Ukrainian Studies. One of the central pieces of that was language. 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. Since then, the question of Russian-Ukrainian language clashes has become heavily politicized in Ukraine and in Russia, according to Arel.

“Language acts as a marker of identity,” said Arel. “Ukraine, however, stands out as a case where an enduring political consensus has yet to occur over the foundational aspects of language politics, namely, the political status of the two main languages fighting for public space [Ukrainian and Russian].” To address this, Arel said, the government may put regulations in place which attempt to provide incentives to use the socially disadvantaged language, in this case, Ukrainian.

On Aug. 8, 2012, former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych made just such an attempt, passing a new law on language policy, the Brookings Institute reported, which stated that if 10% of a population’s native tongue is a minority language (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.

On Nov. 20, 2013 tens of thousands of Ukrainians protested their disapproval of Yanukovych's refusal to sign a long-negotiated trade agreement between Ukraine and the European Union. This was seen as a missed opportunity to align with the EU. The demonstrations devolved into deadly violence as Yanukovych’s police force tried to extinguish the protest.

After three months of fighting, the Ukrainian parliament ousted Yanukovych from his presidential position on Feb. 22, 2014. President Vladimir Putin later proclaimed that the Maidan movement, which later came to be known as the Revolution of Dignity, was a Western, particularly American, conspiracy.

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 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 Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Proclaiming the region as a “people’s republic” the separatists voted to become independent from Ukraine and become part of Russia.

According to the now declassified US Department of State diplomatic cables, Putin stopped short of accepting the separatist’s motion, but continued to supply them weapons and ground support with what came to be known as “little green men”. These soldiers, dressed in green army regalia and trained in modern warfare, did not have identifying country markers. They 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 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, outlined by the universally accepted principles and norms of international law.”

Many Eastern Ukrainian residents, who were exhausted by years of conflict, were baited to getting Russian citizenship in the promise of possible stability.

In a statement by the EU leadership, leaders from the European Union member states also 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 people from Eastern Ukraine have been granted Russian citizenship. This brings us to the present moment where this chain of decisions has set the stage on which Ukraine finds itself today.

On Thursday, Feb. 23, 2022, Putin delivered a speech on Russian state television officially recognizing the separatist claims of the Donbas region. Citing the need to protect the Russian citizens living in Ukraine, Putin invaded the country with brute force. Sending missiles across the entire Ukrainian region, Putin warned that outside countries should not interfere in the armed assault or risk “consequences you have never seen in history.”

The head of the U.N. Refugee Agency in Kyiv told NPR that they are bracing for a flow of upwards of five million refugees fleeing Ukraine, making their way across Europe. Ukraine's State Border Guard Service announced late Thursday that “all Ukrainian men ages 18 to 60 are prohibited from leaving the country,” and must conscribe to military service. In a joint statement, Ukraine’s Chief of Staff for the Armed Forces, Valeriy Zaluzhniy and Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov announced on Ukrainian state television that assault weapons and ammunition are being distributed to civilians.

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. Jonatan Vseviov, secretary general of Estonia's foreign ministry and Estonia's Ambassador put Ukraine's situation into a context that I struggle to find better words for: "The military operation that has now been unleashed on Ukraine has no precedent on this [European] continent since 1945. This is a major catastrophe, not just a theoretical problem in some far away country. This is changing not just Europe, it is changing world history - what we're seeing in front of our eyes today,” will change our ways of life across the world.

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.

Edits: Teaser updated. Grammer edits implemented.