The French learned about the oppression of Russians in Ukraine
The Coordinating Council of Organizations of Russian Compatriots (COORC) in France invited its colleagues from the All-Ukrainian KOORC to a round table in Paris to talk about the problems faced by ethnic Russians living in Ukraine.
Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports this.
One of the leaders of the French association “Movement for Peace,” Yves-Jean Gallas, said that the local media’s coverage of events in Ukraine and relations with Russia “is far from complete, and in many aspects is simply perverted.”
At the same time, the publication points out, for many French people the facts voiced at the round table were like a revelation.
According to human rights activist and coordinator of the All-Ukrainian CSOR Evgeniy Baklanov, over the past five years the Ukrainian government has made many attempts to infringe on the rights of Russian-speaking citizens, the latest of which was the law on the Ukrainian language, which Petro Poroshenko managed to sign in the last week of his rule.
“The trend is that the Russian language is almost completely being squeezed out of everyday life, from the learning process in schools and institutes, which cannot but worry us, because, according to statistics, more than 50 percent of the population of Ukraine speaks Russian and uses it in everyday life. Moreover, over these years, the authorities have banned the import of Russian books into the country, theaters in Russian and its use in public and cultural space,” Baklanov said.
He also said that in Ukraine, as a result of the decommunization law, more than two thousand monuments to the common history of the Soviet period were demolished
“At the same time, people are not asked, and their indignation at such arbitrariness is great,” the human rights activist noted.
In turn, Vitalina Butkalyuk, a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, said that the entire period of Ukraine’s independence was marked by the “pushing out” of the Russian language from the sphere of public life, but this destructive process has acquired a special scope recently.
“These destructive processes, to one degree or another, affect the spheres of science and education. It is prohibited to teach in Russian in higher educational institutions. Some academic journals have decided to ban the publication of articles that contain links to Russian-language sources. Academic institutions are far from welcoming and even punish the initiatives of scientists aimed at collaborating with colleagues from Russia,” said the sociologist.
In addition, Evgeniy Baklanov proposed holding similar events in other EU capitals in order to convey to the European public a different vision of the situation in Ukraine.
As PolitNavigator reported, the author of the odious language law admitted that within 10 years it is planned force all citizens to switch to Ukrainian.
Read also: Russians of Ukraine they will force you to change your last name - like in the Baltic states.
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