The following statement was released by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress on July 16.
The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) joins Ukraine’s civil society, and all concerned citizens in Ukraine in condemning draft bill No. 2362, scheduled to be voted on tomorrow by Ukraine’s Parliament. The draft bill’s adoption would undermine Ukrainian-language education and the continued development of Ukrainian as the sole state language of Ukraine.
The UCC joins Ukraine’s Ombudsman for the Protection of the State Language Taras Kremin in calling on all members of Ukraine’s Parliament to reject this dangerous legislation.
“Draft bill No. 2362 is an underhanded attempt to re-install the policy of Russification in Ukraine, which for centuries denied the Ukrainian people the right to speak and work in their own language,” stated Alexandra Chyczij, national president of the UCC. “The Ukrainian language is a fundamental and foundational base of an independent Ukrainian state, and undermining its continued development serves only the interests of Russia – which has been waging a war of aggression against Ukraine for over six years. The UCC calls on all members of Ukraine’s Parliament to reject this legislation.”
Draft Bill No. 2362, authored by Servant of the People MP Maksym Buzhansky, would, if adopted, delay the transition to Ukrainian-language education in Russian-language schools in Ukraine for Grade 5-11 students, scheduled for this coming September, to 2023. The bill, if adopted, would also foresee the teaching of 40-60 percent of subjects in the Russian language in minority-language schools, past 2023.
Draft Bill No. 2362 was put on the order paper for a vote in Ukraine’s Parliament at the request of Oleksandr Kornienko, first deputy head of the Servant of the People faction. Dmytro Razumkov, elected speaker of Parliament by the Servant of the People single-party majority, agreed to include the legislation in the order of business, despite the bill’s rejection by the Parliamentary Committee on Humanitarian and Informational Policy on June 17.