MOSCOW, July 18. /TASS/. Ukrainian Culture Minister Alexander Tkachenko acknowledged that speaking both Russian and Ukrainian is natural for the country’s population.

"We are bilingual from birth; we speak both Russian and Ukrainian. For us it is natural," he said during a Rada TV broadcast.

The culture minister made the admission when attempting to explain that Ukrainians would be able to learn English as required under a bill proposed by Ukrainian Pesident Vladimir Zelensky on the status of English as the language of international communication.

Earlier, Kiev introduced a prohibition on Russian-language songs, books and other creative products in public places. However, former Ukrainian Presidential Aide Alexey Arestovich (designated a terrorist and extremist by Russian financial watchdog Rosfinmonitoring) said earlier that Kiev remains a Russian-speaking city, and Kiev residents have started using the Russian language more frequently in day-to-day communications.

The Russian language in Ukraine

Ukraine adopted a course toward the open eradication of the Russian language immediately after the coup in February 2014. Right after the new government came to power, the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine’s parliament - TASS) voted to abolish the law, in effect since 2012, granting Russian the status of a regional language in those areas where it is spoken by at least 10% of the population. The revocation of this law was one of the reasons for the emergence of the protest movement in eastern Ukraine, where the population is predominantly Russian-speaking.

Since 2016, Ukraine has been introducing language quotas for radio and television, and in 2017 the Verkhovna Rada passed a new version of the law "On Education," which called for gradually banning the Russian language in the country’s educational system. On May 15, 2019, then-Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko signed the law "On Ensuring the Functioning of the Ukrainian Language as the State Language," which further restricted the use of Russian and introduced fines and an entire range of penalties for violating the language law. Since February 2022, these processes have only intensified, with local authorities introducing complete bans on the use of Russian and the teaching of Russian in schools.