Previous Subchapter → 7.1 Defining Genocide
But that aside, how close is this rhetoric to the truth?
Well, there clearly is an ethic and cultural element to the Ukraine conflict, it began in 2014 with a split between segments of Ukrainian society that wanted to stay tied to Russia struggling against those who wanted to assert a separate Ukrainian identity, and when that conflict turned into war, these divisions became sounded out with guns and bombs, people have died because of these identity crises and prejudices, since the war began language in particular has become a highly politicised topic, with Ukrainian disappearing from schooling and Russian being made the sole state language in separatist territories and Ukrainian becoming the sole state language in Ukrainian territories, with quotas on its use in the media being enforced, on both sides of the divide linguistics became not just a hot button issue, but a definer of political loyalties.
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The results of this can be clearly seen, polls in 2012 showed that 40% of Ukraine’s population claimed Russian as their native language, 10 years later that number had dropped to 16%, in just a single decade the number of people claiming Russian as their mother tongue had more than halved.
And as for the seperatist population, when Ukrainian was axed from schools in the Donetsk Republic, seperatist officials claimed that no one, no one at all, wanted Ukrainian to be the language their children were taught in, if we were to take these statements at face value, apparently the number of Ukrainian speakers in the Donbas is something like “0%”.
With figures like these we can see that this politicisation of language created an imposing cultural atmosphere where people feel uncomfortable speaking their own mother tongues for fear of being seen as an enemy, and this is a process that has been going on not for weeks, or months, but years, almost a decade.
Let this sink in for a second, imagine waking up one day and all the TV stations are speaking a language you don’t understand, you go to school one day and suddenly your teacher is teaching in this language too, and you’re at risk of being seen as a traitor if you don’t walk along this uncanny valley.
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For a point of comparison elsewhere in Europe, we could look to Switzerland, and its 3 main languages, German, French and Italian, 4 in every 6 Swiss speaking German, the others speaking French and Italian; Imagine if German suddenly became the country’s sole language, French speakers and Italian speakers no longer accommodated, the damage that would do to such a multilingual society, that’s what happened here.
So culturally speaking, the Ukrainians and Russians have been chipping away at each other, but in no way has this escalated to industrial scale genocide, no matter how many times this message is repeated.