A bill to boost Ukrainian-language music content on prime-time radio was supported by 260 musicians, including Ukrainian rock legend Oleh Skrypka.
KYIV – Despite an abundance of popular, high-quality music in the Ukrainian language, much of it doesn’t get primetime airplay on Ukrainian radio stations. It’s most often played after midnight – a practice that has long been criticized and has become particularly relevant during a time of Russian war against Ukraine statehood.
Civic activists and pop musicians have conducted a campaign since the winter to get legislation approved that would boost prime-time Ukrainian-language radio quotas to 35 percent from the current 5 percent average airtime, culminating in a vote in the Verkhovna Rada at its June 2 session.
Yet the nation’s legislators rejected four attempts that day to approve either of two bills that would have introduced quotas for the Ukrainian language. Critics said the vote confirmed that the nation’s ruling elite – most of whom are exclusive Russian speakers, whether privately or publicly – are fighting Ukrainianization.
“They practically became allies of Putin and the ‘Russky Mir’ [the concept of the Russian World] today, and Parliament humiliated itself today,” National Deputy Andriy Illyenko of the nationalist Svoboda party said of his colleagues after the vote.
“I can’t imagine how the Verkhovna Rada can call itself Ukrainian after this, if it can’t even defend our state’s information sphere on an elementary level,” he added.
The original bill (No. 3822), which was supported by Vice Prime Minister Viacheslav Kyrylenko and submitted to Parliament on January 27 – earned only 191 out of 226 needed votes.
It was supported by a majority of the deputies of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc (56 percent, or 80 votes), the People’s Front (77 percent, or 62 votes) and the Self-Reliance (85 percent, or 22 votes) factions, while it was rejected by the Opposition Bloc (getting zero votes), Radical Party (10 percent, or two votes) and Batkivshchyna factions (16 percent, or three votes).
The deputies voted in a similar pattern in three subsequent attempts to approve an alternative bill (No. 3822-1) that would have introduced smaller quotas.
It was submitted on May 25 – or rushed through Parliament as the original bill approached a vote, as alleged by critics – by 10 deputies that included Rada First Vice-Chair Iryna Gerashchenko of the Poroshenko Bloc.
It was vehemently opposed by the supporters of the original bill, who said it created too many loopholes to avoid playing Ukrainian-language music.
With the original draft, “musicians and civic activists offered significant compromises to the representatives of the radio industry, agreeing to reduce the quotas to 35 percent and to introduce them gradually over two years,” said Leonid Ovcharenko, an activist with the Vidsich (Rebuff) civic organization. “But they demanded that the quotas be identical for all radio stations and be applied equally at all times. The bill was unanimously approved in committee and passed on to Parliament.”
Meanwhile, the alternative bill emerged in consultations with “mediynyky,” Ms. Gerashchenko wrote in a June 5 Facebook post, using a vague reference to the radio station owners and/or their representatives. Lawyers and executives of the radio stations were also consulted, she said.
Currently, the only quota that exists on Ukrainian radio is that 50 percent of the content of radio stations has to be produced by a Ukrainian national. In most cases, the music is in the Russian language, Mr. Ovcharenko said. And most of the Ukrainian language music is set aside for after midnight.
The original bill called for a 35 percent prime-time quota for all stations regardless of format, gradually being introduced at 25 percent in the first year, 30 percent in the second year and 35 percent thereafter.
The alternative enabled stations to avoid the quotas if their format was non-musical. It also enabled reducing the quota to 20-25 percent if the music was of a specialty format, such as rock, pop, R&B, hip hop, lounge, classical or folk.
The original bill set the quota for every six hours of programming, while the alternative bill allowed for 30 percent of Ukrainian-language content in a 24-hour period to be played between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. It set no requirements for the remaining 70 percent between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.
That means that much of the Ukrainian-language music could have been played between 6 and 8 a.m., Mr. Ovcharenko said.
“The alternative bill has a lot of loopholes that would have been exploited,” he said. “Our proposal has no exceptions – 35 percent for all stations, at all times.”
The original bill was supported by 260 Ukrainian-language musicians, including Ukrainian rock legend Oleh Skrypka.
“We live in a country where the Ukrainian language is forbidden,” Mr. Skrypka said during a February 1 press conference, citing statistics that 8 percent of the content of Ukrainian radio and television stations was in the Ukrainian language under Leonid Kuchma (1994-2004), 4 percent was Ukrainian under Yushchenko and Yanukovych (2004-2013) and now it’s down to 1.5 percent. (He didn’t state the source of his figures.)
“That’s horrifying! I am sure there are structures that are consciously destroying the Ukrainian language in Ukraine,” he continued. “I don’t know what these structures are, but their activity led to our society eagerly swallowing [Russian pop songs] with cursing in the enemy language, but not [the Ukrainian song] ‘Sich Army’ at a time when there’s a war in the east. This isn’t normal and that’s just a small example to show the reasons why the country is in decline now.”
Ms. Gerashchenko said the activists’ bill would have ruined several radio stations because it placed upon them Ukrainian-language requirements that are incompatible with their formats.
She accused the Samopomich party – with its stronghold in Lviv – of backing the original bill with the intent of ruining several Lviv radio stations on behalf of rival businessmen so that they can acquire their frequencies.
In response to her claim about formats, activists said there are plenty of Ukrainian-language works for any format. For example, 145 compositions were included in the “Pearls of Classical Music – Ukrainian Collection” compact disc set – more than enough to fulfill the 35 percent quota, one activist pointed out on Facebook.
Another advantage to her bill, she said, is that it would have given Ukrainian-language songs emerging in the last 18 months twice their weight when calculating quotas, giving more incentives for radio stations to play young, budding performers.
Yet Mr. Ovcharenko dismissed that as yet another crafty maneuver to play less Ukrainian-language music, potentially reducing such content to 10 percent.
As for Mr. Skrypka’s suspicion of “structures” resisting Ukrainianization, the detector.media news site revealed in an April that Ukraine’s radio market is dominated by two Ukrainian citizens: Victor Pinchuk, the media and industrial magnate who has yet to be heard speaking in Ukrainian, and Mykola Bagraev, a native of Russia who was a member of the Party of Regions.
Mr. Pinchuk has done a lot to highlight Jewish suffering in Ukraine. Besides financing a documentary about the Holocaust in Ukraine, in 2008 Mr. Pinchuk sponsored a photo exhibit in New York called, “The Shooting of Jews in Ukraine: Holocaust by Bullets.” He didn’t finance any Holodomor commemoration efforts on the 75th anniversary but did agree to lend film-making equipment used for the Holocaust documentary.
Mr. Bagraev, who was once a national deputy with the Party of Regions, has actively opposed Ukrainian-language quotas in Parliament. He has stakes in 18 radio stations, while Mr. Pinchuk has 19 such stakes, according to the detector.media news site.
The end result of the legislative effort was both bills being sent back to committee and the status quo being maintained, which was the goal of the alternative bill from the start, as alleged by an appeal signed by the country’s leading Ukrainian-language advocates, including Vidsich Coordinator Kateryna Chepura, the Kapranov brothers, Oles Doniy and Roman Matys.
“Obviously, bill No. 3822-1 was submitted to block the approval of any bill and bury the idea of quotas,” said the appeal, which was published on Facebook on May 26, or exactly one week before the vote.
It concluded, “In the event that bill No. 3822 will be nullified with amendments or won’t be approved at all, the political forces that reject this bill will demonstrate their enmity towards Ukraine and Ukrainian values.”