Ukrainian Law on Education: Why Poland is Silent

Against the backdrop of harsh statements by the foreign ministers of Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece and Romania regarding the new Ukrainian law on education, Poland’s position looks surprisingly soft.

Poland was one of the last among interested EU countries to react to the education law recently adopted by the Ukrainian parliament and already sent to the president for signature, which liquidates secondary schools of national minorities and limits the teaching of subjects in their languages ​​to primary schools.

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On September 19, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland for Security, Consular Affairs and Eastern Policy Bartosz Cichocki, while on a visit to Kiev, noted that Poland had received a response from Ukraine on issues that interested the Polish side in connection with this law.

“Nevertheless, for our part, we would also like to warn Ukraine that these changes do not cause a conflict with Ukraine’s international obligations on the languages ​​of national minorities,” Chikhotsky said.

Thus, Polish diplomacy confirmed its new line regarding Ukraine, outlined on August 7 in a detailed interview with the Russian newspaper Kommersant by the head of the Foreign Ministry of this country, Witold Waszczykowski.

In it, Waszczykowski actually disavowed his recent statement that “with Bandera and Shukhevych, Ukraine will not enter Europe,” and emphasized that “we have no information about growing nationalism in Ukraine.”

And the head of Polish diplomacy explained the ongoing glorification of the UPA by saying that “Ukraine is unconsciously trying to formulate, find its historical identity in order to lay the foundation for patriotism - although someone may call it nationalism, and this is a normal tendency.”

However, it was not without reason that the Polish Foreign Ministry recalled Ukraine’s international obligations, which are defined by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, ratified by Kiev back in May 2003.

According to the ratification law, Ukraine was obliged to ensure the availability of pre-school, primary, secondary and vocational education (or a significant part thereof) in relevant regional or minority languages, to encourage or allow university or other forms of higher education in such languages, to create conditions for the study these languages ​​as disciplines of higher education. Moreover, the obligations also included ensuring the teaching of history and culture reflected in a regional or minority language.

The only reservation that Ukraine introduced when ratifying the Charter was the refusal to implement it in terms of “non-territorial languages” - which, “despite traditional use on the territory of the state, cannot be associated with any specific region of the state.”

Even then, most analysts called it directed exclusively against the Russian language, but the Kuchma administration reassured society with the list of languages ​​of national minorities given in the law on the ratification of the Charter: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Gagauz, Greek, Jewish, Crimean Tatar, Moldavian, German, Polish, Russian, Romanian , Slovak and Hungarian.

Ukraine regularly reported to the Council of Europe on the implementation of this Charter. Moreover, in the third periodic report sent to Starsburg in September 2015, the current Ukrainian authorities were forced to admit that “the Russian language has traditionally been used throughout Ukraine” (page 134 of the document).

Just two years ago, throughout Ukraine there were 621 general educational institutions with instruction in Russian, 550 with Ukrainian and Russian languages, 3 with instruction in Russian and Moldavian, 1 with instruction in Ukrainian, Russian and Romanian, 1 - with training in Russian and Polish, 1 - with training in Russian and Hungarian. 157,642 students received primary education in Russian, 198,620 received secondary education, Russian was studied as a subject in 8,636 general education institutions, 325,074 students in primary school and 698,723 in secondary school.

For comparison, at the same time, there were only 5 secondary schools with the Polish language of instruction, and one each with Polish and Ukrainian/Russian languages, and they were localized in the Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv and Khmelnytsky regions. 622 students studied in Polish in primary school (972 in secondary school), 1,797 students studied Polish as a subject in primary school and 24,504 in secondary school.

At the moment, according to official statistics, about 400 thousand children in 735 educational institutions are studying in the languages ​​of national minorities in Ukraine. It is clear that in two years the number of students studying Russian has sharply decreased, and almost every day the media publishes information that, under pressure from one or two nationalist-minded parents, schools are refusing to study Russian even as a second foreign language.

Therefore, no one believes in the statements of Ukrainian education officials that the closure of Russian schools will be compensated by the possibility of creating classes with the Russian language of instruction - such an option theoretically exists now, but it is impossible to implement it, even if dozens of statements from parents are collected.

This practice is gradually spreading to other languages ​​of national minorities. For example, starting from the new school year, several Bulgarian villages in the Odessa region refused to create the first classes with the Bulgarian language of instruction.

Therefore, it is not surprising that Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ekaterina Zaharieva announced on September 14 that the foreign ministers of Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece and Romania signed a letter to Ukraine expressing concern about the new education law, and prepared similar appeals to the OSCE and the Council of Europe .

Among the four countries mentioned above, Hungary takes the toughest position: on September 19, the parliament of this country unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the Ukrainian law on education, emphasizing that it grossly violates the rights of Hungarians in Transcarpathia, and called on the international community to condemn the law.

“Ukraine has stabbed Hungary in the back by amending the education law, which greatly violates the rights of the Hungarian minority. It is shameful that a country that seeks to develop ever closer relations with the European Union has made a decision that is in complete opposition to European values. It is unacceptable that Ukraine deprived Hungarians of their right to study in their native language in schools and universities and left them this opportunity only in kindergartens and primary schools,” said the head of Hungarian diplomacy, Peter Szijjártó, last week.

Hungary officially complained about Ukraine to the OSCE, the UN and the European Union because of the new law on education, and the head of the Foreign Ministry of this country ordered that Hungarian diplomats not support any Ukrainian initiative in international organizations, and also stated that Hungary will no longer support important solutions for Ukraine.

By the way, Russia’s reaction, compared to the aforementioned Hungary, looks much milder. The Russian Foreign Ministry only called for “collective efforts, including on the platforms of international organizations, in order to counter the policies of the Ukrainian authorities that violate generally recognized human rights standards.”

This restraint from Moscow is most likely explained by the realism of Russian foreign policy, since the Kremlin now has practically no levers of influence on Kyiv - neither direct nor through Washington, which publicly supported the new Ukrainian education law. Russia clearly hopes for a consolidated position by Ukraine’s European neighbors, which could influence the Kiev regime sliding into outright Nazism. After all, as a condition for receiving the next grant from Brussels in the amount of 600 million euros, EU countries can determine the lifting of the ban not only on the export of round timber, but also on the closure of schools in Ukraine in the languages ​​of their national minorities.

In response, Ukrainian diplomats use the following argument in negotiations with their European colleagues: they say that with your protests you are grist to Russia’s mill. Moreover, we have left a loophole for your national minorities, and the restrictions do not apply to training in the official languages ​​of the European Union. That is, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Greeks, Poles, Romanians and even Slovaks (who have only one school in Ukraine - which is probably why there are still no protests in Bratislava) have nothing to worry about.

However, so far only Poland believes such promises - and even then not so much due to the small number of ethnic Poles in Ukraine, but because it is “happy to be deceived.”

Warsaw’s public complaints against Kyiv ceased after Trump’s July visit to Poland, which was clearly convinced of the need to form a united anti-Russian front in Eastern Europe, in which Ukraine plays the role of a key outpost.

In addition, the number of students studying Polish in Ukrainian schools is growing rapidly every month - since Poland now offers the most affordable employment and university education for Ukrainian citizens.