Ukraine fines Kharkiv mayor for using Russian language on social media posts

New Delhi: Ukraine has penalised the mayor of Kharkiv, a city with over 30 per cent Russian population, for using the Russian language on social media posts.

This is not the first time that Igor Terekhov, the mayor of Ukraine’s second largest city, has been fined for using Russian. November last year he was fined for using the language on a TV show.

The penal action comes from the commissioner for the protection of the state language. According to the official document, as reported by Russia Today, the mayor is guilty of using “a language other than the state one” on his Facebook and Telegram pages, which he listed as official channels.

The offence was instated last year and carries a fine of around $93.

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Terekhov, after he was fined last year for the first time, filed a law suit against the language commissioner. He has maintained that while the official communication will be done in Ukrainian, he will keep speaking to the people of the city in Russian.

Ukraine’s crackdown on Russian language

In 2019, Ukraine passed a new language law. The law has since seen regular revisions with the latest coming just this month. It requires all government communication to either be conducted in Ukrainian or made available in the language at the same time.

Russians make a significant minority in Ukraine. The Donbas region in eastern part of the country is home to the Russian speaking majority provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, which rebelled against Kyiv after the 2014 coup that saw removal of a democratically elected pro-Russia president Viktor Yakunovich for a pro-West Petro Poroshenko. Moscow has alleged that US sponsored the coup.

Donbas is the centre stage in the ongoing war in Ukraine.

On Tuesday, former US president Donald Trump also accused Victoria Nuland, the US Secretary of State for Eurasian affairs in 2014, to have supported the coup, which lies at the roots of the conflict in Ukraine.

Ever since the regime change in 2014, Kyiv has brought in laws to remove Russian language away from the public sphere.

Removing Russian literature from public libraries

Earlier this month, Yevgeniya Kravchuk, a senior member of the Ukraine’s parliament, on said that they have removed millions of copies of Russian-language books from its public libraries.

In June last year the Ukrainian education ministry proposed removal of over 40 books by Russian and Soviet authors from the syllabi.

The list of to be banned authors included the greats like Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Alexander Pushkin, as well as Boris Pasternak and Mikhail Sholokhov, both of whom won the Nobel Prize for literature.

In December last year, the country’s Culture Minister Aleksander Tkachenko urged the world to “boycott” Russian culture. He argued that Moscow has been using it for propaganda.

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