Cold War of Languages in Ukraine as a Prelude to the Hot War between Russia and Ukraine

By the time Ukraine gained independence in 1991, it was a society deeply Russified during the Soviet era. To this day, it remains bilingual to a large extent. Its profound Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism, a complex and multifaceted issue, became a subject of the political and cultural conflict between two prominent competing political elites, the pro-Ukrainian and the pro-Russian.

The pro-Ukrainian political elite's vision was to transform Ukraine into a liberal democracy of the European type, overcoming the Soviet legacy and Russian influence through national consolidation. A vital element of this strategy was promoting the Ukrainian language, which was considered the ultimate element of Ukrainian self-identification. This strategy aimed to gradually diminish the role of the Russian language in public communication.

The pro-Russian political elite's vision was to conserve Ukraine's belonging to the sphere of Russian cultural and political influence and Russian-Ukrainian bilingualism as one of the elements of the Soviet legacy and as a manifestation of a separate identity of a specific category of the Ukrainian population.

Over the past decade, the conflict between the two language policies has escalated into a kind of cold war, mainly due to the intervention of a third force, the Russian leadership. This intervention, initially limited to soft power, escalated in 2014 when armed conflicts were ignited in the South and East of Ukraine, leading to the annexation of Crimea and part of the Donbas region. In February 2022, a full-scale invasion was launched to capture the entirety of Ukraine. Symbolic linguistic arguments have played a significant role in legitimizing these acts of aggression.

The proposed paper will undertake a significant and comprehensive analysis of the linguistic conflict in Ukraine, examining it from political and military struggle perspectives and on the level of communicative reality.