Claims about language and ethnicity in Ukraine, including confusions between the two — for instance, that parts or all of eastern Ukraine are “majority Russian” — still appear in western media reports. Now that Vladimir Putin has proclaimed all of eastern and southern Ukraine “Novorossiya” (New Russia) — that is, “really” part of Russia and not part of Ukraine — these facts become all the more important to understand.
Here are a few maps to help with that.
Linguistic anthropologist Laada Bilaniuk, author of Contested Tongues: Language Politics and Cultural Correction in Ukraine, writes perceptively about the rise of Ukrainian civic nationalism (as opposed to ethnic nationalism) in the wake of the Russian military threat to Ukraine’s borders, here.
This video is an example of many that I myself have come across in Ukrainian social media in recent weeks:
The line — “I never thought of nationality until the present moment. We have no such line in our passports, thank God” — strikes me as a poignant one, since it is this that the Svoboda (Freedom) party would like to introduce. Despite their representation in the current coalition government, however, Svoboda’s support is not very high: their leader Oleh Tiahnybok is polling at 1.7%.