Protesters Ukraine want to speak Russian
Protesters in Ukraine wearing shirts with the message, "I want to speak Russian"
A 2012 law had made Russian, the mother tongue of more than half the country, legal as an administrative language in 13 of 27 regions

Chronicling the latest in the Kiev regimes decent into madness, the Ukrainian Constitutional Court has ruled that the law: No. 5029-6 "On the foundations of the state language policy", also known as the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law, which protects the regional status of Russian language, is unconstitutional.

Simply put, this means that although a majority of Ukrainians speak Russian (even those with moderately Russophobic beliefs), Russian will still not be recognized as having any legal status in Ukraine.

ethno linguistic map Ukraine
Actual statistics in Ukraine, about the difference between Russian and Ukrainian (people as well as language), are very hard to come by, as they are extremely politicized, and the difference is blurred.

In reality, one could simply choose arbitrarily which one they are, or which language they speak. There is no uniform divide where Russian ends and Ukrainian begins, in ethnicity or language.
russian language use ukraine
For the sake of simplicity, it is safe to say at least 50% of Ukrainians speak Russian as their primary language, if not more. Ukrainian speakers themselves are divided between those speaking "standard Ukrainian", those speaking Western Ukrainian which is heavily influenced by Polish, and those speaking Surzhik (mostly village people), which is basically Russian and Ukrainian at the same time.

If you add the Surzhik speakers, to the Russian ones, you could say around 75% of Ukrainians speak Russian. As a result, banning the language which has in many ways been more formative to Ukraine than modern Ukrainian, is utterly ridiculous.
ukrainian territorial growth
The shining microcosm of this hypocrisy is the fact that the Ukrainian President Poroshenko himself has forgotten Ukrainian words, needing to ask in Russian how to say the word for "wallet" (Hamanetss').


That video is proof alone to an outside how much Russian language is part of the normal speech in Ukraine. The Ukrainian president himself relies in Russian as his primary language, no matter how hard he tries to hide it, yet nationalists in the country still refuse to recognize Russian.

As noted, official statistics are hard to find, because they are often politicized, but if you really know Ukraine, you would understand that the Russian language is an intricate part of organic daily life.
ukraine russian language
To be clear, is perfectly alright for Ukrainian citizens to prefer Russian, I am not implying anyone should be forced to speak Ukrainian properly or otherwise. However, it is incredibly hypocritical to claim Ukrainian is the language which all the people love, and must be spoken, while Russian is the "aggressor" language.

Western pundits especially, who speak neither language often push this narrative, unaware how many Ukrainians speak Russian, proving they know little about the country. The majority of the public still communicates daily in Russian, from common people on the street up to the president himself.