Ukrainians are ushering the Russian language out of their country at a rapid pace

On the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Vlada Belozorenko, a Kyiv theater director and public speaking coach who grew up speaking Russian, decided that all his business would now be conducted exclusively in Ukrainian.

The native of Kherson in the south, who speaks mainly Russian, now has about 110,000 people following him on Instagram, where he posts short videos with tips on building Ukrainian vocabulary and improving speaking skills.

Business is booming. He has launched an online training course in public speaking in Ukraine. Individual coaching sessions have been booked for months and she is looking for another place for lessons in her theater studio in the center of Kyiv.

“I learn Ukrainian together with people. I have found my own approach and try to do it easily, fun and friendly,” said Belozorenko, 35 years old.

Employers make the switch

For large companies, the shift to Ukrainian has accelerated since last year’s invasion, after decades when Russian was the main language of business.

Data from the job search platform Work.ua show that employers posted 84 percent of vacancies in Ukraine and 13 percent in Russia by the end of 2022. In 2015, it was almost the opposite: 16 percent of vacancies in Ukraine and 80 percent. cent in Russian.

Businesses in the Russian-speaking cities of Odesa, Dnipro and Kharkiv are moving to Ukrainian the fastest, he said.

Ukraine’s largest banks have excluded Russia from their mobile apps and websites. Monobank, with seven million retail clients, updated the app in September 2022 only in Ukraine. By then, usage of the Russian-language version had dropped by 30 percent since the invasion.

Most Ukrainians are bilingual

Ukrainian is the official language of the country, but most Ukrainians are bilingual after the Soviet and imperial generations, when the Russian language was promoted and Ukrainian culture was suppressed.

Ukrainian has traditionally been more widely used in the west of the country, while Russian is more common in the south and east, as well as on the streets of the capital, Kyiv.

Many Ukrainians across the country are seeking to remove Russian influence, to strengthen their independence from their neighbor whose forces have destroyed Ukrainian cities and killed thousands.

The most famous is President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, from the predominantly Russian-speaking southern city of Kryvyi Rih, who first became famous as a Russian-language comic but now hardly ever speaks in public.

New names for cities, towns, streets

The process of “de-Russification” started after 2014, when Moscow annexed and annexed the Crimean peninsula and backed proxy forces fighting in the east, has accelerated since Russia’s full-scale invasion last year.

Streets, towns and villages have been renamed – including 288 streets in Kyiv alone – and statues of Russian historical figures pulled down. State railway Ukrzalizhnytsia has launched a three-year program to rename stations and replace signs “to destroy everything that connects us with the aggressor state.”

Moscow argues that the policy to encourage Ukrainians amount to discrimination against Russian speakers, one of the justifications for invading.

The transition is difficult for some

Kyiv denied it involved coercion, and said it reflected national popular yearning. But there are signs that some people are finding the transition difficult.

Official education must now be conducted only in Ukrainian, and Russian is banned on the campus of one of the country’s leading liberal universities, Kyiv Mohyla Academy.

This month, Liubov Vorobyova, a lecturer at the Irpin State University of Taxation north of Kyiv, rejected students’ requests to switch to Ukrainian during online philosophy classes, saying it was difficult to adjust after 35 years of teaching in Russian.

A video of the class was uploaded on social media, causing an uproar. The university said the lecturer has been suspended and an investigation is underway into the matter. Reuters could not reach Vorobyova for comment.

Family conversation

Belozorenko said her class is about teaching people to be more comfortable using Ukrainian in public to “encourage but not criticize.” He is most proud of the changes he says took place without prodding.

His Russian-speaking parents lived under Russian occupation for months in the Kherson region before Ukrainian counter-offensives seized the region last year.

“In family conversations with my parents and brothers, we started using Ukrainian, and it happened without interference,” Belozorenko said.