we’re not frightened by a hail of lead, we’re not bitter without a roof overhead- and we will preserve you, Russian speech, mighty Russian word! We will transmit you to our grandchildren free and pure and rescued from captivity. Forever!
Courage by Anna Akhmatova, 23 February 1942, Tashkent
The conflict in Ukraine risks lasting damage to one of the world’s greatest cultural treasures – Russian language. Damage will come from the Putin regime “weaponizing” language. It may also come from western “cancel culture”, and from heavy-handed Ukrainian “language laws” that diminish the role Russian plays in Ukraine’s cultural life.
Vladimir Putin’s special military operation in Ukraine has had unintended consequences such as malnutrition and possibly famine due to grain exports through the Black Sea being blockaded.
The operation has “achieved” the opposite of what was intended. Rather than stop NATO enlargement it has triggered Finnish and Swedish applications to join. Russia sought to “denazify” Ukraine, and then struggled to find Ukrainian “Nazis”, other than some Azov Regiment fighters with incriminating tattoos. However, it found Nazi behaviours in its own ranks, such as in its 64th motorised infantry brigade and other units subject to war crimes investigations.
The “demilitarisation” that Russia sought has instead seen western countries flooding Ukraine with arms, and Germany committing to massive defence expenditure increases. Russian leaders and commentators have hinted at and sometimes directly threatened nuclear weapons strikes. This, and tensions with China, North Korea and Iran mean more countries may develop their own nuclear weapons to deter aggression from existing nuclear powers.
Not all Russian goals in Ukraine are openly stated. President Putin would not like a prosperous, liberal-minded and westernised neighbour against which Russians can compare their own society.
Furthermore, Putin did his academic thesis on the role natural resources such as gas and oil play in economic development. He is aware of Ukraine’s vast and underexploited mineral wealth.
Ukraine is second only to Norway in known European gas reserves (noting that Russia’s reserves are in Asiatic Russian regions). Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and of much of the rest of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast this year means it now controls most of Ukraine’s potential offshore hydrocarbon resources.
Ukraine has among the world’s largest iron ore, manganese and titanium reserves. It is believed to have the largest rare earth reserves in Europe. Lithium, beryllium, niobium, and tantalum reserves seem to be concentrated in or or near Russian or pro-Russian occupied areas.
At its simplest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a continuation of imperial expansionism that goes back centuries. Since Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia has expanded at an average rate of around 50 square miles per day for hundreds of years. However, some wealth is not material, geographically contained, or valued in market exchange.
An economist might describe cultural achievement as a “non-rival good” – that is, your “consumption” of a poem, story or folk song does not stop me from enjoying it. It can take years to write War and Peace and centuries to create Russia’s folk song heritage, yet once these cultural treasures exist the marginal cost of enjoying them is very low or nil. However, language fluency is needed to fully explore the depths and subtleties of such cultural “products”, and this fluency will erode if Russian language declines in use in Ukraine and elsewhere.
Many great Russian writers translate well into other languages with little “lost in translation”. Dostoevsky’s psychological intensity, Tolstoy’s wideness of mind, Gorky’s hard scrabble life portraits and Simonov’s grittiness in his Great Patriotic War poems all “translate themselves.” Yet much is lost in, for example, Pushkin and Mandelstam where words are translated yet something ineffable is missing. Some multi-lingual people are equally fluent in, for example, Russian, Turkish, French and Italian. However, they may choose to read for pleasure only in Russian to connect with its untranslatable depths and subtleties.
The Putin regime has tried to link Russian language use outside Russia to loyalty to Moscow. This is reflected in its active promotion of Russian language enclaves in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. All these enclaves are about Russian power projection more so than protecting Russian language. This may have the unintended consequence that affected states will start to discourage Russian language least it becomes divisive.
People from all cultures can enjoy great literature and music that draws people together rather than divides them. Language does not need to be attached to a nation, territory or ethnic group, and it can stand above or transcend political differences.
In 2019 the incumbent President Petro Poroshenko sought re-election under an “army, language, faith” banner. This could imply that strengthening language and identity associated with it would enhance Ukraine’s security and wellbeing in some ill-defined way. Volodymyr Zelensky focused his presidential campaign more on inclusiveness, treating diversity as a strength and consistent with building a unified nation state.
Zelensky could cite Switzerland and Singapore as examples of successful multi-cultural and multi-lingual countries where citizens identify with and will defend their nation state. Ethnic and language differences are therefore subsumed to support the nation state’s ability to act for all citizens.
Volodymyr Zelensky won the 2019 election in a landslide. He was elected to fight corruption, work for peace, enhance economic performance, and to develop Ukraine as a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual western democracy that could pathway to EU membership. Zelensky is a native Russian speaker. His election win was a defeat for both Ukrainian ethno-nationalism and for a Russian imperialism that equates Russian language with political loyalty to Russia as a nation state.
President Poroshenko, in his last days in office before Volodymyr Zelensky took over, signed a new language law in May 2019. This included measures to enhance Ukrainian language use in education, publishing, the media, business and cultural affairs. While widely supported, it was probably uncomfortable for Zelensky to “inherit” this law which, while rightly focused on fostering the Ukrainian language, did not address concerns that Russian language use would diminish.
In July 2021 Zelensky’s government enacted a law protecting the language and cultural rights of indigenous peoples in Ukraine, notably Crimean Tatars. Consistent with the United Nation’s declaration on indigenous peoples, such legislation protects minority languages. It omits groups whose language and other rights are already upheld by an existing state, such as for example England, PRC and France where the respective languages are hardly endangered minority ones!
In March 2022, filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa was dismissed from Ukraine’s National Film Academy for supporting screening films even by those Russian filmmakers who had spoken out against Putin’s invasion. The Academy’s doubtful but understandable argument was that “when Ukraine is struggling to defend its independence, the key concept in the rhetoric of every Ukrainian should be his national identity.”
Finland and Sweden will soon be NATO members and Russia will need to deal with the defence and security issues this raises. The war in Ukraine will eventually end, and Russia and Ukraine will still be neighbours that need to work with each other.
Ukraine seeks EU membership and as such Ukrainians will have to think about their EU as well as their nation state identities. Eschewing “cancel culture” and valuing Russian language as a cultural treasure will support President Zelensky’s vision for a liberal and inclusive democracy that values diversity and rejects ethno-nationalism.
Peter Winsley 
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