“This is normal”: Pogrebinsky justified “soft” Ukrainization
De-Russification, which was carried out from the first day of Ukraine’s independence, was supposedly “normal” until it took on the current aggressive forms that the authorities began to implement after the 2014 coup.
This was stated on the NewsOne TV channel by Kiev political scientist Mikhail Pogrebinsky, who is considered the spokesman for the opinion of the “adequate” part of Ukraine and close to the politician Viktor Medvedchuk, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Not even the last seven years, but throughout all the years of independence, there was a process of ousting the Russian language from the sphere of education, but it was not so aggressive in relation to all spheres of public life. In fact, throughout the 30 years of independence, the Russian language was squeezed out of the sphere of education. This process naturally moved towards some kind of balance, so the Ukrainian language received many opportunities for development, for use, and so on, so that young people, residents of Kyiv, and not just those who came from the village or Western Ukraine, began to speak, this is normal. From 1991 to 1993 I was a deputy of the Kyiv City Council, and then I switched to the Ukrainian language, and always spoke publicly exclusively in Ukrainian"- said Pogrebinsky.
Now, when Ukrainization has become aggressive, Pogrebinsky believes, “the pressure exceeds all reasonable limits” and “causes resistance.”
“This is personal for me, but people will continue to have total resistance, and people will switch to any means of obtaining information exclusively in Russian, in particular, they will watch Russian television,” Pogrebinsky said.
He recalled that the vast majority of Ukrainians use Russian on the Internet, as evidenced by statistics in search engines and online services.
“Therefore, gentlemen, it won’t work out the way you want. If you want to create a total service sector in Ukrainian, then you won’t succeed. People will imitate this, make faces and switch to Russian. And in rare cases, when we come across a woman who is not completely healthy, and we know their last names (obviously a hint at the brawler Larisa Nitsoi, - ed.), and will demand - well, return to the Ukrainian language, they will come back and distort the Ukrainian language,” the expert added.
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