EN
UA
PL
An attack on the sacred: the 2012 Kivalov-Kolesnichenko Language Act
The war with Russia was actually not difficult to predict. It went to that. It could not be otherwise. The aggression against Ukraine in 2014 and the current war are from the same series of historical events as Moscow's bloody massacre of free-loving, democratic, as we would say now, Novgorod during the time of Ivan the Terrible, as well as the Baturyn massacre, as well as many other well-known phenomena of the past. Because free-loving Ukraine is the historical antipode of authoritarian Moscovia-Russia. At the beginning of the 21st century, Ukraine showed examples of freedom-loving, impossible not only in authoritarian Russia, but also in most countries of the democratic world - the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2013-2014. There is an opinion that the aggression against Ukraine has been triggered by the fact that the Russian leadership is afraid that free-loving Ukraine can become an example for russians. I don't think so. The leadership of Russia knows who it governs and understands that a democratic outbreak in the country, which their own national poet characterized with the words "The land of slaves, the land of masters", is impossible. Unless it is a bloody riot in the name of not spiritual, but material values. Russia's aggression is a rejection of otherness, it is a war of civilizations. It could have avoided only under one condition - at the cost of losing one's own identity. Today (how quickly time flies!) ten years have passed since the most brutal attempt in our memory to deprive Ukrainians of their identity by the hands of the treacherous, technically Ukrainian authorities. On August 10, 2012, Act of Ukraine"On the Principles of State Language Policy", known as the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko act, entered into force. It was the same undermining of Ukrainian statehood as the so-called The Kharkiv Agreements, the frontmen of which were finally taken up by domestic justice. Now, in retrospect, anyone who wants to can find information about who of the then "people's elected representatives' voted for the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko Act, and who of the then intellectuals - writers and scientists - took part in the "discussion", organized by the presidential services on the eve of its signing by Yanukovych, giving this action the appearance of legitimacy. But real Ukrainians did not give in to the language, realizing that this is the line that we have no right to give up. Serhii Borshchevskyi, writer and diplomat In the photo: the painting "The Creation of a Nation" by the Honored Artist of Ukraine Artur Orlionov, Kyiv
