Ukraine’s new law on education replicates the reasons, which in 2014 caused the civil conflict in Donbass, and thus prevents settlement of the conflict, Russia’s Ambassador to OSCE Alexander Lukashevich told a meeting of the Organization’s Permanent Council.
“By continuing the earlier line in the language question, Kiev’s authoriti4es once again provoke the situation and replicate the reasons, which to a big extent were the starting point in development of the conflict, and later on the civil war in Ukraine’s southeast,” he said. “Adopting this law prevents parties to the Ukrainian conflict from rapprochement and postpones chances for its final settlement.”
Although the Russian language is not mentioned directly in the new law, “clearly, the key objective of the current Ukrainian legislators is to infringe maximum interests of the millions of Russian-speaking residents of Ukraine, to have by force a mono-ethnic language regime in a multi-ethnic country.”
“This initiative of Kiev’s authorities is an attempt of the “Maidan” power to organize a language “cleaning” of the country’s educational space, which contradicts directly the country’s Constitution, namely Articles 10, 24 and 53, and the undertaken international obligations,” he said.