Attitudes to Ukrainization policies among Ukraine’s Russophones

The research on the Ukrainian Russophones’ attitudes to Ukrainization policies is extensive. However, while this scholarship provides valuable insights into the matter, the findings often conflict and do not allow us to draw a coherent picture of how Russophones have perceived the Ukrainization policies over time. Thus, some studies of the discourses and language ideologies underlying the Ukrainization policies have described them as relatively unproblematic. By contrast, others focused on the aspects of Ukrainization policies that could potentially alienate Russophones. Similarly, among the studies of popular perceptions of Ukrainian and Russian, everyday language practices and attitudes to the language policies, some have focused on the Russophones who welcomed Ukrainization policies and believed that Ukrainian should be used more, with some voluntarily converting to Ukrainian. Meanwhile, others highlighted how some Russophones perceived Ukrainization policies as such that put them at a disadvantage and resisted them by subverting policy prescriptions and disputing the critical pillars of these policies. This section discusses how the findings of the existing studies have been conflicting in more detail.

To begin with, studies of language policies and discourses guiding their implementation have shown different potentials of these policies to engender grievances among Russophones. Thus, Bilaniuk has observed that Ukrainian language policy has, over time, moved in the direction of solidifying the status of Ukrainian and decreasing the role of Russian (Bilaniuk Reference Bilaniuk2022), and the studies of the discourses of Ukrainization underlying these policies and their implementation have described them as potentially problematic. As such, Friedman has characterized ideologies of teaching Ukrainian in schools as essentialist (Friedman Reference Friedman2010), and, echoing her, Kudriavtseva has suggested that such ideologies of Ukrainian are exclusionary and can potentially be problematic in how they can be applied in policymaking (Kudriavtseva Reference Kudriavtseva2021). However, observing everyday bilingual practices in Ukraine, Bowring concluded that the existing Ukrainian legislature did not oppress Russian speakers (so long as they were not “purely” Russian speakers, but Ukrainian-Russian bilinguals) and that the alternative to Ukrainization, the application of the European Charter of the Minority Languages that would increase the status of Russian was not an ideal solution for Ukraine (Bowring Reference Bowring and Ryazanova-Clarke2014).

Studies focusing on popular perceptions of the roles of Ukrainian and Russian in Ukraine, and stereotypes associated with them, have also highlighted different views of Russophones on these languages, leading to conflicting conclusions on their perception of Ukrainization. Thus, some studies have shown that Russophones seemed unlikely to welcome comprehensive Ukrainization: at least before 2014, they largely agreed with the symbolic status of Ukrainian, but not so much with the possibility of it having a high status in all domains of life. Thus, Kulyk found that in 2006, 74.4 percent of Ukrainian nationals and 59.3 percent of Russian nationals considered Ukrainian a symbol of Ukrainian statehood, while 50.2 percent of Ukrainian nationals and 15.2 percent of Russian nationals believed that Ukrainian should be used more (Kulyk Reference Kulyk2013a). In turn, the most detailed study in this category by Søvik that recorded perceptions of the use of both languages in specific domains showed that in 2009, in Kharkiv, these perceptions were still rooted in a (colonial) logic of the superiority of Russian in the domains associated with modern life. Russian was considered to be the language of the urban population and of the younger generation much more than Ukrainian, and a more prestigious language overall. Meanwhile, Ukrainian was described as melodious and a language of authorities to a greater extent (Søvik Reference Søvik2007, 237). One of the respondents, a professor of physics at a local university, even described Ukrainian as unsuitable for writing a dissertation in physics, and Ukrainian language journals as unsuitable for disseminating the research (Søvik Reference Søvik2007, 223). Conversely, other studies have highlighted changing attitudes toward Russian and its decreasing status among the Russophones. Thus, in 2021, some Russophone Kharkiv residents considered Russian a language of the enemy, which Filipova and Deineko (Reference Filippova, Deineko, Aasland and Kropp2021) explained by the proximity of the Russian border and a sharper-than-elsewhere perception of a threat coming from Russia. It remains unclear, though, how the changing attitudes to Russian have changed Russophones’ attitudes to Ukrainization — whether Ukrainian came to occupy the domains Kharkiv residents imagined it unsuitable for in the past, or whether other languages, such as English, have replaced “the language of the enemy” in its role as the language of modern life.

Studies of everyday language practices also do not draw a coherent picture of how Russophones have adopted Ukrainization policies. While some showcase compliance with these policies, others have shown that the ambiguity of the perception of Ukrainian has translated into a trend to subvert Ukrainization policies and use Russian in the domains where the use of Ukrainian was prescribed. Thus, on the one hand, parents seemed to have been increasingly choosing Ukrainian as the language of instruction (Jamnaat Reference Janmaat1999; Kalynovs’ka Reference Kalynovs’ka, Besters-Dilger and Lang2009). However, this trend was not as present among families with both Russian parents (except in predominantly Ukrainophone areas such as Lviv) (Janmaat Reference Janmaat1999). But what’s more, Polese (Reference Polese2010) and Kalynovs’ka (Reference Kalynovs’ka, Besters-Dilger and Lang2009) have observed the use of Russian in formal Ukrainian schools. At the same time, other studies have showcased how Russophones converted to Ukrainian either in separate communicative domains, such as online (Kulyk Reference Kulyk2018) or in all spheres of life (Bilaniuk Reference Bilaniuk2020). Puleri’s (Reference Puleri2020) study of (former) Russophone writers has shown that even those who connected their livelihood with the Russian language have converted to Ukrainian since 2014. What we don’t know is how ubiquitous the conversion phenomenon has been. We also do not know conversion trends across domains; for instance, how likely the people connected to STEM domains have been to use Ukrainian and how their language use patterns differed from those connected to non-STEM domains. Meanwhile, comparing domain-specific patterns of the use of Ukrainian can help understand the actual state of Ukrainization.

Lastly, the studies explicitly measuring attitudes to language policies allow us to see that these attitudes have long been ambiguous, but not so much how salient dissatisfactions with the policies have been. Thus, some respondents of Laitin’s Reference Laitin1998 study were dissatisfied with the decreasing status of Russian because they strongly identified with the language. Still, no data in this study could be used to confidently support or contest Laitin’s claim that “in Ukraine […] the nontitulars would react quickly, perhaps even arm themselves, to protect their security” (Laitin Reference Laitin1998, 190). Kulyk’s analysis of the 2006 Hromadska Dumka survey confirms Laitin’s findings, showing that some Russian speakers, especially those educated in the Soviet Union, were perceiving constraints in the use of their preferred language in some communicative domains, such as communication with the state. However, Kulyk emphasizes that at the time, for all respondents, language concerns were not “nearly as important as an increase of living standards, fighting corruption, or other socioeconomic goals.” (Kulyk Reference Kulyk2013b, 287). Later studies also noted ambiguity in attitudes toward language policies. Thus, in 2014, KIIS found that 40 percent of Russian speakers in Donetsk, 30 percent in Luhansk, and 25 percent in Kharkiv regions thought their language rights were constrained.Footnote ¹ The same survey found that for some (47 percent in Donetsk, 44 percent in Luhansk, and 37 percent in Kharkiv regions), the grievances were strong enough to justify Russian intervention to protect their interests as they answered “yes” to the question “Do you agree that Russia rightly protects the interests of Russian-speaking citizens in the South-East of Ukraine?” As Soroka, Kudriavtseva and Danylenko (Reference Soroka, Kudriavtseva and Danylenko2023) found in 2023, grievances persisted, albeit articulated somewhat incoherently by their respondents. Thus, 45 percent of Russian speakers (51 percent of the citizens of the East (Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kharkiv; 47.7 percent of Donbass), controlled areas of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, who, in their survey, believed that the state does not treat speakers of all languages equally in Ukraine. By comparison, only 20 percent felt that “successes and achievements of Ukrainian citizens” depend on the language they speak (p.72). We do not know, though, how these grievances impacted how Russophones have engaged with Ukrainization policies.

Overall, existing studies reveal contentious sentiments toward Ukrainization policies and various ways in which Russophones have engaged with them. A detailed analysis of interaction with one policy could allow us to draw a more coherent picture of the Russophones’ engagement with Ukrainization. Filling the gaps in the knowledge about the possibility that the Ukrainization policies could marginalize Russophones, domain-specific patterns of compliance with/resistance to these policies and the changing attitudes to Ukrainian and Ukrainization policies brought about by the policies, this study details Russophones’ engagement with the standardized tests policy by analyzing how universities valued Ukrainian in admission process, and what values Kharkiv citizens attached to languages in Kharkiv forum posts.

Ukrainian state language policies on the promotion of Ukrainian and the place of standardized tests among the Ukrainization reforms

Standardized tests in Ukraine, called External Independent Testing (Zovnishnie Nezalezhne Otsiniuvannia, or ZNO), were not designed as a language policy but ended up being, arguably, the most formidable one, as they are mandatory for all seeking higher education and affect social mobility prospects. The first successful attempt at their implementation was brought to Ukraine as a part of a transparency reform package funded by the Ukraine Threshold ProgramFootnote ² to facilitate institutional change in three key areas: judiciary, customs, and education. Fueled by an anti-corruption sentiment from within the country, the educational reform proceeded fast, and as early as 2009, standardized tests became mandatory for all university admissions in Ukraine.

The widely supported goal of transparency was to be achieved through uniformity, which, in the language domain, meant uniformity of assessment in the Ukrainian language. Before the tests, universities could come up with their own forms of examination in the Ukrainian language that did not always comprehensively test this knowledge. For instance, in 2004, the entrance exam to Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute was such a basic form of examination, such as dictation,Footnote ³ and high levels of corruption in higher education made it possible to surpass even the requirements of this kind. Meanwhile, ZNO, although not unproblematic, was a more sophisticated tool for testing the knowledge of Ukrainian, focusing on different aspects of grammar and style, and separately targeting the knowledge of the differences between Ukrainian and Russian. Passing such a test required engagement with the school curriculum in Ukrainian.

Standardized tests were, arguably, the only unavoidable and high-stakes Ukrainization policy in Ukraine. Since 1991, Ukraine has introduced a range of Ukrainianization policies, but, for the most part, they were inconsequential for the majority of the Russophone population. For instance, some Russophones avoided Ukrainization policies in the media by avoiding Ukrainian media. Thus, starting from 1993, the state mandated the state television to broadcast in Ukrainian (while granting a possibility for regional TV to broadcast in the language of the minorities living in the region) (Article 9 of the Law of Ukraine on TV and Radio, 1993Footnote ⁴); and starting from 2016, the state required at least 40 percent of the content to be in Ukrainian (Article 9 of the Law of Ukraine on TV and Radio, as edited in 2016Footnote ⁵). As Zhurzhenko has observed, before the Orange Revolution of 2004, in some villages in the East, the extent of exposure to the Russian media was such that some children believed Vladimir Putin to be their president (Zhurzhenko Reference Zhurzhenko2005). Søvik believes that with domestic events becoming more interesting and covered more in Ukrainian than in the Russian media, the use of Ukrainian media increased, but in 2005, 40 percent of Kharkiv residents still watched TV only in Russian (Søvik Reference Søvik2007, 179). In 2014, for many Russophones in Odesa, it was the primary source of information on which they relied in interpreting controversial events (Hale, Shevel, and Onuch Reference Hale, Shevel and Onuch2018). The ability to access this content allowed the consumers of Russian media to shelter themselves from the impact of the Ukrainization of the local media. Policies mandating the use of Ukrainian in government could be avoided less easily, but on a day-to-day basis, they mainly affected civil servants. Meanwhile, Russian-speaking clients were accommodated in the overwhelming majority of encounters — 79.9 percent of Søvik’s respondents responded to the RS clients in Russian only (the other 13 mostly in Russian, and only 1 percent — only in Ukrainian) (Søvik Reference Søvik2007, 181). It was not until 2019, with the passing of the Law on Ensuring that Ukrainian functions as a state language,Footnote ⁶ that more people got exposed to Ukrainization on a day-to-day basis. This law required the government workers and the service industry personnel to address the customers in Ukrainian and made Ukrainian more visible in the Russophone areas.

A trend of subverting the Ukrainization policies was also observed in the educational domain, where teachers long kept teaching most of the subjects in Russian, even in Ukrainian medium schools (Polese Reference Polese2010; Kalynovs’ka Reference Kalynovs’ka, Besters-Dilger and Lang2009). Studies of language use in schools since the full-scale invasion show that the situation has been different, at least since the 2021/2022 school year. Most classes (87 percent in the 2021/2022 and 93 percent in the 2023/2024 school year) were taught in Ukrainian (State Service of the Quality of Education in Ukraine 2024). The situation has likely changed after the 2017 educational reform, which curtailed Russian medium instruction and more strictly mandated instruction in Ukrainian for school and university instructors. Still, given the lack of after-reform studies researching the actual language use in the schools before the 2021/2022 school year, we cannot be fully confident in how this trend has unfolded. Even more so, the 2021/2022 school year data may only reflect the post-invasion trend, as the respondents were asked to remember about 2021/2022 in a 2023 study. As such, mandatory tests in Ukrainian, since the moment of their introduction and until 2017/18, were the only mass unavoidable Ukrainization policy.

Given the diverse linguistic landscape of Ukraine, this policy was potentially polarizing, and understanding its perception among the Ukrainian Russophones can help understand the impact of Ukrainization policies more generally. Systematically examining this reform is important as it provides unique opportunities to fill the gaps in the knowledge about Russophones’ engagement with the Ukrainianization reforms identified earlier. Thus, comparing the standardized test results scored by Ukrainophones and Russophones can help evaluate the possibility that the Ukrainization policies could marginalize Russophones. Examining how educational institutions have adopted the standardized test policy may help better understand domain-specific patterns of compliance with/resistance to the Ukrainization policies. Lastly, analysis of the discussions of the tests in media and social media may help see how Russophones have changed their attitudes toward Ukrainian and Ukrainization policies with the introduction of the language mandates. This study will do this using original datasets both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Theoretical framework

I suggest examining the patterns of engagement with and the effects of language policies in Ukraine, applying and criticizing Greif and Laitin’s (Reference Greif and Laitin2004) theory of endogenous institutional change. Relying on the examples of Estonia and Nigeria, Greif and Laitin offer that primordial beliefs, that is, “belief[s] that ethnic/nationality differences are biologically given and ultimately more important than any other possible identification when it comes to social, political, or economic transactions,” are a product of external overrule, British colonial in Nigeria and Soviet in Estonia (Grief and Laitin Reference Greif and Laitin2004, 646). For them, these beliefs are an outcome of the “overrulers” codifying tribal/national differences and making distributions based on tribal/national identities, thus making it lucrative for tribal/national representatives to cultivate the beliefs that the cultures of their constituents were primordially given (p. 646). In their view, the primordial beliefs remaining from the colonial rule continue to underlie the ethnolinguistic cleavages after the colonial rule ends.

However, they also argue that the divisive effects of “everyday primordialism” can be overcome under the right circumstances. They identify two pillars on which the change rests: the status of the tribal/national language when the external overrule is gone, and the cohesion of the state language-related institutions. If the status of the language of the plurality group is high and is supported by the centralized institutions, over time, other nationals will learn this language as its knowledge will be key to their social mobility. With the “relatively high status of Estonian language and culture in the eyes of Russian-speakers” (p. 647) and centralized political institutions, Estonia, for Greif and Laitin, is an example of a state that successfully pulled off endogenous institutional change. Meanwhile, Nigeria, for them, is an opposite case where the language of the plurality never became accepted by most citizens, the culprits being the federal structure supporting tribalist aspirations and the path-dependent colonial era beliefs about the inferiority of the plurality language group (Hausas), preventing the establishment of a local language in the status of the language of social mobility. In Greif and Laitin’s framework, the status of the language when the external overrule is gone thus serves as an independent variable in the settings that otherwise share several similarities, such as “everyday primordialism” and its crucial role in organizing national (tribal) groups.

Applying the Greif and Laitin’s model to the Ukrainian case would mean seeing the centralized language policy supporting the status of Ukrainian as a unifying factor if the status of Ukrainian was high in the eyes of Russian speakers at the time of the adoption of this policy, and as a divisive factor, if, at the time, its status was low in their eyes. I suggest, though, that before the model is applied, it needs to be reified since its discussion of the status of the plurality group in Grief and Laitin suffers from several omissions. One such shortcoming is the claim that the status of Estonian was initially high in the eyes of Russian speakers. Given that in the Soviet Union, Russian was a primary language of social mobility, progress, and science, no non-Russian language could automatically be considered as such that had a higher status than Russian upon the collapse of the USSR, meaning that Estonian acquired its high status in the course of the implementation of the centralized policies. I suggest that the status of the plurality language is not just an independent variable but simultaneously a dependent and independent one. If language policies are mandatory and can affect social mobility, the status of the language within the country will increase, and the status will thus be dependent on the policy. At the same time, though, increased status will encourage conversion, the conversion thus being dependent on the status.

Besides, the relative status of the language of the former “overrulers” within the country should be further added to this framework. Greif and Laitin’s framework falls short of discussing the relative status of this language and how it may impact the status of the language of the plurality. For instance, they never mention that English has remained the official language of Nigeria after the colonial rule ended, potentially undermining the prospects of any non-English language occupying the dominant place. Nor have they discussed the social mobility prospects the knowledge of Russian has allowed for in the post-Soviet spaces since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even more so, the authors never explain what they mean by status. Decolonial theory (Coulthard Reference Coulthard2014) helps us think about the status of the language of the former overruler not as a stable given but as context-dependent, domain-specific, and changing with time. It allows us to suggest that the former plurality language changes its status directly to how the current plurality language does. Russian may be perceived as superior to Ukrainian in Russia, but in Ukraine, such perception depends on whether Russia is recognized as the undisputable center by its citizens and the state. And this recognition may change. Building on Hegel’s notions of master/slave dialectics and Fanon’s ideas about internalized colonization, Coulthard outlines how this change may occur. For Coulthard, in settler colonial contexts, colonizers undermine the authority and the knowledge of the locals through the discourses of modernity, presenting them as backward, underdeveloped, and ill-fit for the future. The colonized get socialized into perceiving themselves through this lens early on, with this scheme justifying the colonial rule as such that facilitates the moral and cultural development of the colonized group (Coulthard, p. 146). The way out of this scheme for the colonized is to “reinscribe value and worth to those identity-related differences that colonial discourse had hitherto characterized as savage, dirty, and evil” (Coulthard, p. 140). In the language domain, this means that the (colonial) relationship between the languages of the colonized and that of the colonizer is such that the former is perceived as not developed enough to suit the needs of the modern world, while the need to rely on the latter language is pictured as the way to secure a place in the modern economy. Reinscribing value and worth to the former then undermines this scheme as it robs it of the basis in reality. Reinscribing worth to the Ukrainian language through the practices that make it valuable in the modern economy, then, can undermine the status of Russian insofar as the status of Russian is based on the perception of Ukrainian as unsuitable for it.

Applying a decolonial lens can, overall, allow us to account for the change in the status of the language that is being revitalized in the centralized state institutions and the change in the non-plurality (former plurality) language. It allows us to see the policies increasing the status of Ukrainian as an anticolonial cultural self-affirmation practice that changes not only the status of Ukrainian but also the status of Russian relative to Ukrainian. The decolonial lens allows us to discount language status as an independent variable in Greif’s and Laitin’s framework and to argue that, regardless of the initial status of the plurality and non-plurality languages in post-colonial contexts, the centralized state language institutions engender cohesion, making the ethnolinguistic fractionalization cleavage less pronounced over time.

If adding the decolonial perspective to such contexts is relevant and if the unitary language policies produce cohesion in Ukraine in accordance with this perspective, we can expect to see the relative status of Russian and Ukrainian changing in Ukraine. This can manifest in actors at different levels choosing Ukrainian over Russian when given an opportunity. Besides, we can expect that the changes in the value of Ukrainian will be different across domains. We can expect this change to occur more slowly in the domains associated with progress and modernity. Besides, in these domains, we can expect that Russian will be replaced not by Ukrainian but by other languages associated with progress, such as English, as the stereotypes concerning the suitability of Ukrainian in these domains may be ingrained so deeply that even if the overall prestige of Russian declines, Ukrainian does not necessarily become automatically perceived as suitable for them. We can also expect the discourses of (de)colonization to gain more prominence in the discussions of these language policies, legitimating them as decolonial self-affirmation practices.

Methodology

Methodologies of existing studies have been allowed to elicit only a partial understanding of the engagement of Ukrainian Russophones with Ukrainization policies. To this end, existing studies have not considered language choices across domains. Besides, most of the studies have looked at the dynamics between Ukrainian and Russian in isolation from other languages. There have been some exceptions to this general trend. Thus, Søvik’s (Reference Søvik2007) study measured attitudes toward Ukrainian and Russian separately among students of technical and non-technical disciplines. Besides, sociolinguistic studies rooted in the language ecology approach have observed that in some Russophone regions, English has been acquiring a prominent role with English-medium instructions used not only for international students but to attract domestic students by promises of social mobility (Tarnopolsky and Goodman Reference Tarnopolsky and Goodman2014). However, more studies of this kind are lacking, making it challenging to see the trends in the dynamics between Ukrainian and Russian (and English) over time and across domains. Moreover, while the studies have measured attitudes to languages, they did not look at the actual language choices in the situations where people could make a free choice. Analysis of Russophones’ engagement with the standardized tests policy provides opportunities to fill these gaps. It allows us to assess the support of Ukrainization across domains by different actors and take not only Russian but also English into account.

Firstly, we can measure the support of the increase of the status of Ukrainian by the universities as, from 2017 to 2022 every program could freely assign value to the test of Ukrainian language, relative to other subjects for the purposes of admission (the overall admission score was composed of several components: standardized tests grades for different subjects and the high school certificate average multiplied by coefficients established by each university program where no standardized test could weigh less than 20 percent of the overall grade). The coefficients universities assigned to the test of Ukrainian can provide a glimpse into the attitudes towards the mandatory tests of Ukrainian language among the university administrations in different regions of Ukraine. University programs choosing to value the test of Ukrainian at more than the default 20 percent would signal their support for the increase in the status of Ukrainian. This study analyzes the weight assigned to the test of Ukrainian by 1263 university programs. In my choice of majors, I was guided by the Forbes Ukraine rating of the 100 best university programs in Ukraine. I separately calculated coefficients for the non-STEM and STEM majors. Here, STEM majors include exact sciences (physics, mathematics, applied physics, and applied mathematics), natural sciences (biology, chemistry, biological engineering, chemical engineering), medicine (medicine, diagnostics, medical psychology, pediatrics, and pharmacology), and IT (computer programming, computer science). Non-STEM majors include three of the most popular and prestigious majors (as per Forbes Ukraine): law, management, and economics and social sciences majors (sociology, political science, and psychology). I did not include humanities majors due to the lack of relevant, compatible data across regions for most of the humanities majors (for instance, 8 out of 24 regions do not have philosophy majors). In turn, the majors that are present across the country, such as, for instance, philology and translation, have a significant linguistic component and, due to their focus, assign high value to the knowledge of Ukrainian by default. To analyze the choices of the universities, I looked at the average coefficients applied to the test of Ukrainian in all regions of Ukraine in admissions from 2018 to 2020 (as available on the Unified State Database on the Questions of Education (EDBO) websiteFootnote ⁷).

Secondly, we can measure the support for the increase in the status of Ukrainian by the students, as until 2022, they were able to freely choose the language in which they took their subject tests (excluding the test of Ukrainian language and other language tests). Students’ language choice can indicate the actual language of instruction. Having learned the subject terminology in a certain language, students are more likely to select this language when being tested in this subject. The data for this part comes from the yearly report on how the standardized test sessions went, including the data on the test takers’ choices of the language of the test issued by the Ukrainian Center for the Assessment of the Quality of Education,Footnote ⁸ including 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. I looked at the all-country trends and the trends for several Russophone regions. For consistency, I did not include Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk, and the Luhansk regions in the all-country numbers. To see if the all-country trends were true for Russophone regions, I separately included the numbers of tests in both languages for four major Russophone regions — Kharkiv, Odesa, Dnipro, and Kherson. Besides, to see how the test language choice differed across domains, I looked at the choices in the tests of history and mathematics in the Kharkiv region. I did not include languages other than Ukrainian or Russian in these calculations since the number of test takers who chose to pass tests in other languages is relatively negligible; it is especially true for the Russophone regions where it is only in Odesa region that someone took tests in another language (Moldovan), and the number of such test takers did not reach 0.1 percent. I hypothesized that, firstly, there would be an upward trend toward choosing Ukrainian and, secondly, that in STEM disciplines, test takers would be choosing Ukrainian less than in non-STEM disciplines.

For the third part of this study, I employed a critical social media content analysis methodology. Unger, Wodak, and Khosravinik (Reference Unger, Wodak and Khosravinik2016) suggest that, like other strands of critical discourse analysis, it allows for untangling the power dynamics and ideologies communicated via certain discourses. One of the ways to analyze the social media dynamics that they suggest is to analyze the dynamics within certain communities and on certain pages in response to certain events (as compared to how social media interactions and interpretations of certain events shape them in return). Paying attention to how people react to each other’s posts, how they engage in comments, and which contributors they support can help us see group ideologies and differences between them. For this article, I have analyzed interactions on a forum of a Russophone city, Kharkiv, Kharkovforum, to see how the citizens have reacted to the state policies of increasing the status of Ukrainian. I chose this source because it contains discussions on this topic by local community members and because all news items by the local media outlet Obiektiv get reposted there. As such, this source gives a glimpse into discussions in the local community, local media, and discussions of local media topics in the community. I have searched for the threads pertaining to the learning of Ukrainian in the educational system and beyond, and the place of the Ukrainian language in society. Initially, I planned to look for only the parents’ interactions regarding the education of their children, but such threads were limited, so I expanded my search, which I found appropriate because threads not on language education per se still had conversations relevant to it. The threads I found encompass 2007 (the year right before standardized testing was introduced) until the beginning of the full-scale war in February 2022. Separately, I analyzed the discussions related to the standardized tests (131 topics).

To better situate the attitudes of Russophones to the tests of Ukrainian, this study also includes an analysis of the results of these tests. I am combining two datasets: data on the results of standardized testing in Ukrainian and literature collected in all the regions of Ukraine in 2016, 2017, and 2018 by the Ministry of Education in Ukraine (MOE), data on the number of the students pursuing education in Russian and Ukrainian in all the regions of Ukraine for the same years collected by the Institute of Educational Analytics (IEA), and data on the languages spoken in all the regions of Ukraine collected by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in 2019. The three datasets allow us to see the correlation (or the absence thereof) between the language of the community, the language of education, and the standardized test scores of the Ukrainian students. It is notoriously challenging to measure the language of preference and actually spoken languages in Ukraine due to the prevalence of monolingual essentialist language ideologies in Ukraine which result in respondents misreporting their linguistic profiles and stating only one language, instead of several they may speak as their language, indicating the language they would like to use but do not actually use in daily life as their main language (Arel Reference Arel2002). However, the KIIS instrument has been recognized by researchers interested in the Ukrainian language and identity as the one that shows the most comprehensive account of the languages actually spoken in the country. Thus, KIIS survey takers address respondents in both Ukrainian and Russian and then note the language in which they respond and the language they indicate as their language of preference. Language and region indicators are measured in every survey KIIS conducts as part of the background information of respondents. The three datasets allow us to see how the students from the Russophone areas performed on the standardized tests as compared to the students where the Russian language is not as widespread.

Findings

Russophones’ interaction with the Ukrainization policy in education

Table 1, breaking down the scores in the rural and urban areas in the most and the least Russophone regions (as per KIIS), shows student performance variation. To begin with, the test scores in rural areas are significantly lower than in urban areas. Besides, students in some Russophone urban centers lag noticeably behind those in Ukrainophone ones, as, for instance, in the case of Lviv and Kharkiv for all years. However, we cannot consider language the single most important factor explaining students’ performance, as, for instance, in 2019, students from the Kharkiv region cities performed better than the students from the Khmelnytskyi region cities. Besides, students from Kyiv consistently performed better than students from the majority of the most Ukrainophone urban areas (Ivano-Frankivsk, Volyn, Rivne, Khmelnytskyi). This shows that other factors may have impacted the students’ results on Ukrainian language tests, such as, for instance, school funding. Language of instruction also provides some, but not a complete, explanation of the test results. While the students from Kyiv, who finished their last class in Ukrainian, performed better than their peers in any Russophone region, differences between other Russophone regions cannot be as straightforwardly attributed to the language of instruction in the last class. Thus, a larger percentage of the students from Kharkiv region cities studied in Russian-medium classes than in the Dnipro or Mykolayiv region cities, but the former performed better. Overall, we can see that neither the language of the community nor the language of instruction can fully explain differences in the scores on the test of the Ukrainian language.

Table 1. Scores of standardized tests of Ukrainian in the regions with the biggest and the smallest percentage of Russophones

Table 2 summarizes the findings regarding the value universities assigned to the test of Ukrainian, the percentage of the STEM and non-STEM programs assigning default coefficients, and the average coefficients assigned in STEM and non-STEM programs. In the case of non-STEM disciplines, Russophone cities valued the Ukrainian language on par with Ukrainophone ones. Particularly deserving of attention are the choices of the universities displaced from the occupied territories: all the non-STEM programs from Luhansk region universities went beyond the default option, and so did 90 percent of the Donetsk region ones. In some Russophone regions, the percentage of programs that went beyond the default option was not as high, but still much higher than that of those that did not. Thus, in Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions, 82 and 80 percent of programs respectively valued Ukrainian higher than was absolutely necessary. Besides, the average values assigned to the Ukrainian language tests do not differ significantly across regions, showing that the language of the region is not a strong predictor for how universities value Ukrainian.

STEM disciplines followed a different trend. A significantly higher percentage of the STEM programs all over the country chose the default value for the Ukrainian tests as compared to the non-STEM ones (29 as opposed to 13), and this percentage was often higher in the Russophone regions. However, universities in Ukrainophone regions also often chose to apply a default value to the test of Ukrainian in STEM programs. Additionally, the programs that assigned a default value to the test of Ukrainian, for the most part, accepted the test of the foreign language as the third possible test. This was the case, for instance, in all the programs in software engineering. The 17 programs across Ukraine that valued Ukrainian at 0.2 accepted the test of a foreign language as the third test (for the third test, universities give students a choice of two or three subjects, and in the software engineering programs in question, the choice was between Foreign Language and Physics or History). Interestingly, the value of the Foreign Language test in some of these programs was higher than the value of the Ukrainian one (0.3 in four of them, one each in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Dnipro, and Kherson, and 0.25 in Ivano-Frankivsk and Dnipro).

Table 2. University programs assigning value to the test of Ukrainian

Source: Vozna (Reference Vozna2025a)

Figures 1 and 2 display the data on individual language choices in all tests in the subjects that students could elect to take. Besides the mandatory test of Ukrainian, they had to take one of History or Mathematics and one other elective, for which, in addition to History and Mathematics, they could choose from Geography, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Foreign Language. Figure 1 and Figure 2 display combined averages for all these electives except for the Foreign Language (since this test had to be taken in the respective language). From 2009 to 2021, a clear upward trend is evident in the choice of Ukrainian over Russian throughout the country, including in the four selected Russophone regions. The percentage of students choosing to take the tests in Russian has decreased in both STEM and non-STEM disciplines.

Figure 1. Choice of the Ukrainian language in subject tests (combined for all subjects, percent). (Vozna, Reference Vozna2025b)

Figure 2. Choice of the Russian language in subject tests (combined for all subjects, percent). (Vozna, Reference Vozna2025b)

However, the trend was more pronounced in non-STEM disciplines. Table 3 shows how students were choosing languages for their subject tests in Kharkiv, and also displays a growing preference for Ukrainian in the two subject tests required for admission. Most of the students took their History and Mathematics tests in Russian in 2010, 40.4 percent and 42 percent respectively, and in 2021, these numbers decreased to 5 percent and 15 percent respectively.

The number of Russian-medium schools within the same period has consistently decreased at a similar rate. Table 4 reflects the changes in the percentage of Ukrainian and Russian-medium schools. The data for the earlier years (1992–2006) comes from Dzerkal (Reference Dzerkal2013), and for the later years - from the yearly reports of the Insititute of Educational Analytics on the languages of instruction and the languages studied in the Ukrainian secondary educational system in 2014/2015Footnote ⁹, 2015/2016Footnote ¹⁰, 2016/2017Footnote ¹¹, 2017/2018Footnote ¹², 2018/2019Footnote ¹³, 2019/2020Footnote ¹⁴, 2020/2021Footnote ¹⁵, and 2021/2022Footnote ¹⁶. In Ukraine, the choice of the language of education is determined by parents and school administrations. Although it is reasonable to assume that, after the educational reform of 2017, curtailing instruction in Russian, this choice had been more constrained, we can see that the change in the language of instruction has been taking place consistently and at the same rate before and after the reform. Thus, in the first 15 years of independence, the number of Russian-medium schools decreased by 11 percent, and during the next 15 years — by 7 percent more.

Table 3. Russian language in subject tests in Kharkiv

Table 4. Schools with Ukrainian and Russian medium of instruction in all Ukraine (percent)

Table 5. Language-related topics on the Kharkiv forum

Source: Vozna (Reference Vozna2025c)

All the findings show a consistent decrease in the use of Russian in the educational system by various actors. Students, teachers, parents, schools, and universities have been consistently turning away from Russian-based instruction and valuing the Ukrainian language in the educational system more.

Conclusion and implications

The study contributes to the literature on language policies and identities in Ukraine, arguing that Ukrainianization policies did not alienate Russophones. It does so by showing that since the introduction of the centralized standardized test policy, actors on different levels have been not only complying with, but also taking steps beyond the policy requirements. The study also shows that the Russophones’ continuous and increasing compliance with the policy has gone hand-in-hand with the growing prominence of the (de)colonization narrative.

The findings of this study challenge Greif and Laitin’s claim that when the external overrule is gone, the outcomes of the centralized language policies depend on the initial status of the language of plurality. Instead, this study suggests that the framing of the centralized policies matters, while initial status is not necessarily the most salient factor. Particularly, the decolonial framing of the policies may overwrite the pre-existing ideas about how usable the languages in question are in various domains; the centralized policy and its framing thus act in tandem to challenge and change the status of the plurality of languages. In the Russophone regions of Ukraine, the initial status of Ukrainian was relatively low when the external Russian overrule was gone. Through the lens of Greif and Laitin’s endogenous institutional change theory, such a scenario should not have resulted in Russophones’ accepting Ukrainization policies. However, this study has recorded compliance with and no significant backlash to arguably the most consequential Ukrainization policy, mandating standardized tests of the Ukrainian language for university entry. The findings show that students from the Russophone regions have increasingly chosen Ukrainian when given a choice between Ukrainian and Russian when passing standardized tests in different subjects. Similarly, when given the freedom to assign value to the tests of the Ukrainian language during admission, most of the universities in the Russophone areas have valued Ukrainian more than they were required to. Meanwhile, over the years following the introduction of the standardized tests, residents of a Russophone city, Kharkiv, had ceased to take the presence of the Russian language in the region for granted at growing rates. They began to discuss colonization as a possible reason for the presence of the Russian language. They have also defended the Ukrainization policies, like the standardized tests of Ukrainian, by relying on the (de)colonization rhetoric.

In sum, the (de)colonial framing of language policies in Ukraine articulated by regular citizens allows us to see the policies aiming at increasing the value of the Ukrainian language in the educational system as decolonial self-affirmation practices restoring the value of a hitherto devalued language. Meanwhile, the growing tendency to go beyond the minimal requirements to comply with the policy indicates growing support for the policy.

The findings of this study of Russophones’ engagement with Ukrainization policies contribute to the literature on the place of Russophones in the discourses of Ukrainization. Discussions on the Kharkiv forum show that decolonial discourses of Ukrainization have resonated with Russophones and that they could draw from personal and family histories to find evidence that Russian was an artificially imposed language in the area. This adds to Bowring’s (Reference Bowring and Ryazanova-Clarke2014) point that many Russophones have not been “pure” Russian speakers, but rather, Ukrainian-Russian bilinguals who did not necessarily seek protection of their linguistic rights as Russian speakers. That the findings do not show Russophones in Kharkiv expressing concerns over the real and potential outcomes of the standardized test policy also speaks to this point. A potentially problematic side of the Ukrainization through standardized tests is the stratification that this policy is causing. So far, the discussions of standardized tests in the local media and local social media in Russophone regions do not show signs of the perceived unfairness of the tests or of the citizens’ widespread resentment toward such policies. But the fact that, in some regions, Russophones have lagged behind calls for an ongoing analysis of the outcomes of the Ukrainization policies that affect social mobility.

Besides, the study contributes to the literature on the patterns of Russophones’ engagement with Ukrainization policies. Whereas existing literature has recorded the silent subversion of Ukrainization policies in educational (Polese Reference Polese2010; Kalynovs’ka Reference Kalynovs’ka, Besters-Dilger and Lang2009) and government (Søvik Reference Søvik2007) settings, the findings of this study allow us to argue that this trend has become less pronounced over time. Two findings are particularly relevant here. Firstly, the scores of Russophones on the standardized tests of Ukrainian are largely compatible with those of the Ukrainophones, showing that students have been putting effort into learning Ukrainian. Secondly, the fact that students have been choosing Ukrainian as the language of their subject tests allows us to conclude that it has become not just declared but the actual language of instruction in their schools.

This study also contributes to the discussion of the attitudes of Russophones to Ukrainization policies. The findings suggest that studies of the Russophones’ attitudes to Ukrainization policies should take into account domain-specific attitudes, paying more attention to the changes in the domains particularly affected by the devaluing stereotypes, like STEM domains where Russophones have long favored Russian over Ukrainian (Søvik Reference Søvik2007). This study has examined the weights that the STEM and non-STEM university programs have assigned to the test of Ukrainian during admission and found that, on the one hand, most programs in the Russophone areas have gone a step beyond official requirements. On the other hand, though, non-STEM programs have generally valued Ukrainian more than STEM programs, and the former were most likely not to exceed official prescriptions. Similarly, students have been choosing to take subject tests in STEM subjects in Ukrainian at lower rates than in non-STEM subjects, which can serve as evidence that teachers of STEM subjects may have continued teaching in Russian. The domain discrepancies in language choices observed in this study could shed light on Russophones’ conflicting attitudes about Ukrainization in other studies. Respondents of the studies measuring general attitudes to Ukrainization could express negative views, which could be interpreted as a wholesale rejection of the policies, while respondents could have had specific domains in mind.

Additionally, the findings of the study suggest that Russophones’ attitudes to Ukrainian should be measured not only vis-à-vis Russian, but also other languages, especially English. The STEM programs that assigned the default value to the test of Ukrainian analyzed in this study assigned higher values to the tests of foreign languages. In this scenario, a (possibly) low-value attitude toward Ukrainian did not assume a preference for Russian. These findings highlight the findings of sociolinguistics studies (Tarnopolsky and Goodman Reference Tarnopolsky and Goodman2014) that have recorded a trend of universities in Russophone regions opting for English-medium instruction to increase the graduates’ employment prospects in the globalized job markets. These findings allow us to question the interpretations of Russophones’ resistance to Ukrainization as an interest in preserving the dominance of Russian. Had the existing studies moved beyond the Ukrainian/Russian dichotomy in research of Russophones’ language attitudes and, for instance, allowed respondents of language attitude surveys to express their attitudes to other languages, they may have been able to draw a more detailed picture in which Russian may not have shown up as prominently as respondents may have opted for English instead of Russian if given an opportunity. After all, Ukraine has long been a bilingual country, and Russophones are used to knowing several languages. Søvik’s respondents have aptly described an ability to use both Ukrainian and Russian in Kharkiv as “walking on both legs” (Søvik Reference Søvik2007, 221). As the findings of this study show, when Russophones cease to use one of these legs, they don’t end up walking on one. Some of them replace Russian with English.

The findings of this study also allow us to bring detail to the findings of the post-2022 surveys and reflect on how representative they are and how long-lasting the recorded trends may be. Post-2022 surveys have recorded a spike in the use of Ukrainian among the Russophones, lowering tolerance to the Russian language, and increasing acceptance of the Ukrainization policy. Thus, Racek et al. (Reference Racek, Davidson, Thurner, Zhu and Kauermann2024) have observed that Russophones have been steadily moving toward Ukrainian. Having analyzed geotagged posts of the users of X from Ukraine, they found that since the full-scale invasion, more than half of the users who used to post in Russian started doing so in Ukrainian. In turn, the KIIS 2024 survey has recorded a growing number of citizens willing to eliminate Russian in official domains in Ukraine. Whereas in 2015, 3 percent of Ukrainians from Eastern regions and 21 percent of Ukrainians all over the country supported this measure, in 2024, these numbers have increased to 40 percent and 66 percent, respectively. The changes in language choices and attitudes of Russophones being rather pronounced, one might reasonably wonder if they may be due to a selection bias — what if the people who wanted Russian to keep playing important roles in the country fled the country or decided not to voice their views as the full-scale invasion began? While we cannot be sure of the language and other political attitudes of the Ukrainians displaced since the beginning of the full-scale war, this study allows us to view the changes recorded in the post-2022 surveys as a part of a long-standing trend of Russophones choosing Ukrainian as a decolonial self-affirmation practice. The brightest evidence to this point is that KIIS has found most supporters of eliminating Russian among younger Ukrainians who studied in the educational system that has undergone the standardized tests reform, with 84 percent of citizens aged from 18 to 29 from all over Ukraine supporting this measure. Higher than among other age groups, this percentage is consistent with the percentage of young people choosing Ukrainian for taking subject tests in Russophone regions — in Kharkiv in 2021, 85 percent of students chose Ukrainian to take mathematics and 95 percent for history tests.

The limitation of this study is its focus on universities and the young people aiming to enter universities. It does not consider the experiences and attitudes of those not aiming for university admissions, such as working-class youth and adults. The studies focusing on these groups (Saburova Reference Saburova2024) are consistent with the findings of this study, though. On the one hand, the status of Ukrainian has increased, and working-class Ukrainians from the Russophone areas recognize it as a language suitable for all domains of life. However, on the other hand, they have not been able to demonstrate perfect knowledge of Ukrainian and have come to associate the way they speak it with backwardness.

In light of the findings of this article, showing that the spread of the decolonial narrative has gone hand-in-hand with the growing preference for Ukrainian, we can assume that the young people support more measures for Ukrainization because they have had most direct contact with the domain that had been affected most by the centralized Ukrainization policies demonstrating that Ukrainian language can have value and doing so relying on (de)colonial rhetoric. Given the growing prominence of the decolonial narrative in Ukraine since 2022, we can expect that as more citizens from different age groups become more familiar with it, we may see growing support for Ukrainization measures among them. The rate at which this change will occur is unclear, though, since, as this study shows, the trend for opting for Ukrainian has not always been linear. The spike in the use of Ukrainian that has taken place since the beginning of the full-scale war, recorded by Racek et al. (Reference Racek, Davidson, Thurner, Zhu and Kauermann2024), is unprecedented. As this study shows, before the full-scale war, the preference for Ukrainian was growing at a significantly lower pace, with a 6.3 percent yearly increase in the number of students choosing Ukrainian from 2009 to 2013 and a 1.5 percent yearly increase from 2014 to 2018. An abrupt spike that has taken place since 2022 may be the beginning of a new pattern of support for Ukrainization, but it may as well be a leap after which the change stalls, like it did among the school students in 2014. In this vein, the Ukrainian State Educational Institution “Educational Center for the Quality of Education” (2024) has already noted a decline in the use of Ukrainian among the school students and teachers in the 2023/2024 school year. As such, in the 2023/2024 school year, 4 percent fewer teachers (89 percent as opposed to 93 percent in the 2022/2023 school year) used exclusively Ukrainian in class. Additionally, in the 2023/2024 school year, 32 percent of students, compared to 43 percent in the 2022/2023 school year, used online resources exclusively in Ukrainian. While the report evaluates this trend as worrisome, the decline in the use of Ukrainian has been more pronounced in the private sector than in the official domain, which aligns with the findings of this study that elucidate the support of the Ukrainization policies in the official domain. What’s more, the 11 percent decline in the use of the Ukrainian online content does not necessarily signal an increased preference for Russian; students may have replaced at least some of the Ukrainian language content with content in languages other than Russian. Future studies monitoring the attitudes of Russophones are necessary to assess this trend. Ideally, they would focus on the acceptance of specific policies rather than try to evaluate attitudes to Ukrainization wholesale, be sensitive to the domains respondents work in, and capture dynamics of Ukrainian not only vis-a-vis Russian, but also with respect to other languages in the repertoires of Russophones, especially vital since the beginning of the full-scale war given high rates of Russophones’ displacement and an ongoing threat of displacement to non-Russian speaking countries.