Opinion: Oligarchs who «feed» Ukrainians with a Russian product are behind the attempt to undermine the language law

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Oligarchs want to produce content in a language that is convenient for their big business, rather than in a language that is convenient for Ukrainians.

Opinion by Roman Matys

May 31, 2021

 

Members of parliament from President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party registered bills No. 5554 and No. 5554-1. The goal: to delay the language law provisions stipulating that from July 16 films in Ukraine are to be shown only in the Ukrainian language. This applies to movie theaters, online platforms, and television. 

Activists believe that the «Servants of the People» want to «bury» the language law under the pretext of addressing the coronavirus pandemic consequences and that such a situation could provoke a «language» Maidan. Roman Matys, a civic activist and founder of the «They will understand anyway!» initiative, explains what consequences these bills could entail and what such initiatives of the presidential party mean. 

We have a situation when certain provisions of the language law are to come into force on July 16, and a month and a half before that we see strange activity from some members of parliament who have come up with the idea of postponing these provisions to an unclear post-quarantine future. It is not clear why post-quarantine time is mentioned.

Fact is: They are trying to undermine the language law. And it seems that behind this attempt there is a conspiracy of oligarchs who are pro-Russian owners of those TV channels that «feed» Ukrainians with Russian TV products.

This is the forced domination of Russian content. It looks like they want to ignore us. They want to allow publishers to inform Ukrainians in a language that is convenient for the publishers and multi-national corporations, not the one that is convenient for Ukrainians.

If new russification provisions appear in the bills, we, as the part of the public that was directly involved in drafting the language law, will publicize them.

This time we learned about these bills by chance and publicized them ourselves. Some politicians have claimed that this is a political action against the government. However, the party in power initiated it. After all, these bills were submitted by people from whom no one expected this. This, for example, could be expected from Maksym Buzhanskyi, but not from Yevheniya Kravchuk.

This indicates that there are behind-the-scenes processes that affect the positions declared by the party in power. «Servants of the People» encroach on the rights of the Ukrainian language. After all, the behavior of people who didn’t make such statements before suggests that these processes exist regardless of who voices them.

It is currently advantageous for media owners who broadcast products created for all countries with significant shares of the Russian-speaking population to postpone the entry into force of these language law provisions.

I would like to emphasize that where the law already works there are no problems with companies that have to comply with the language law. In general, the companies began to work in this direction. Many companies have switched to Ukrainian. The on-going process is quite positive. The same thing should happen with film distribution and media–but not everyone will benefit from it.

The question is: who benefits?

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