View original post3. Your statements on the status of Russian in Ukraine are just not correct. First, although I despise the Ukrainian language, which does sound like hick Russian (and you know this is true), the point about Ukrainian is that it has been shoved down everyone's throat. Every Nikolai in Ukraine has been forcibly made a Mykola, every Alexander an Olexander, every Vladimir a Volodymyr, and every Ksenia an Oksana. The 2004 Revolution started the laws that pushed Russian from the public square (and even in 2014 you couldn't find a Ukrainian language newspaper or website based in Kiev; statistics to the contrary are propaganda attempting to justify the limitation on Russian). You have the February 2014 law that only permits Russian in any oblast if more than 10% of the population lists it as "native" (something the authorities manipulated regularly). In 2016, Russian language programming was curtailed significantly on television to less than 25%, and Russian language education was banned in most schools except as a foreign language class. A 2019 law fully banned Russian in any official capacity, as government workers were prohibited from using it. This is when most people continue to use Russian rather than Ukrainian, even in most major cities. The exception is in the west - Lvov, Ivano-Frankovsk, Zhitomir, Vinnitsa, etc.