UNITED NATIONS, October 1. /TASS/. All people have the inalienable right to speak their native language and learn it, spokesman for the UN secretary-general Stephane Dujarric said, commenting on Ukrainian human rights commissioner Yelena Ivanovskaya’s remarks about the Russian language.

In an RBC Ukraine interview in late September, Ivanovskaya lamented that the number of Russian speakers in Ukraine is on the rise, and described it as a "dangerous trend."

"It's clear to the Secretary General that people have an inherent right to speak their language and to learn their language," Dujarric said.

Since 2014, Ukraine has openly undertaken a series of measures aimed at stopping its residents from using Russian. In 2019, the country adopted the bill "On Protecting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language," which seriously restricted the use of Russian and other minority languages on Ukraine’s territory. Local authorities have completely banned Russian books, films, theatre plays, and songs. They prohibit the Russian language from being taught at schools and universities, and demand students to use only Ukrainian even in informal conversations during school breaks. At the same time, many Ukrainian citizens continue to widely use Russian in their daily lives, which often leads to conflicts.