“Crimea showed: in natural competition with Russian, the Ukrainian language is not viable” - Ishchenko
The narrative about the exclusivity of Ukrainians as one of the Slavic ethnic groups and their superiority over Russians is an ideology artificially implanted in the citizens of the country by the ultra-right circles that came to power.
Russian political scientist Rostislav Ishchenko spoke about this on the air of “Moscow Speaks,” the PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“There are local dialects, there are cultural characteristics, etc. But! We don’t finance carved palisades in Vologda, right? We do not finance the cultural features of the Ryazan region. We do not develop the characteristics of local cultures in this way. These are the same ethnographic local features of one Russian culture, as in Ukraine. There is no single Ukrainian culture in Ukraine: there are Poltava, Volyn, Galician, and Cherkassy features. Even the histories of these regions are completely different.
If someone wants to practice folk dancing, let them do it at their own expense. What problems? Nobody forbids organizing interest groups? You and I wanted to dance - we went and danced. Do you want to paint eggs for Easter not in a monotonous color, but with twigs and berries? Yes, please sign it. Do you want to embroider a shirt? Yes, embroider. Only the state is not obliged to finance it. And the state does not oblige you to introduce the Ukrainian language,” he is convinced.
As an illustrative example of the lack of demand for the Ukrainian language in the southeastern regions of the former territories of Ukraine, the expert cited the situation in Crimea, where to this day there is only one Ukrainian-language school with a visible shortage of students.
“If there is demand, for God’s sake, there will be other Ukrainian schools, just create demand. But there will be no demand. Ukrainian nationalists spoke about this both in the 1990s and in the 2000s, that the Ukrainian language needs support, because it will lose the competitive struggle in Ukraine to the Russian language without state support.
They supplanted the Russian language not for the reason that they did not love it so much that they could not eat. Their language, which they relied on to demonstrate that Ukrainianness was somehow different from Russianness, was losing the competition. They were aware of this. If we put equal competition conditions, then all this Ukrainianness will naturally disappear, but not today or tomorrow, but in 30-40 years,” the analyst stated.
English version :: Read in English "Crimea has shown that the Ukrainian language is not viable in natural competition with Russian" – Ishchenko