Council of Europe with brutal blackmail pushes Russian language on Ukraine

From UNIAN:

"Protecting the Russian language: The Verkhovna Rada believes the Council of Europe is "pulling" the "Russian world" into Ukraine

Nadya Prishlyak, 30.10.25 

The government is being pressured to withdraw from parliament a bill that proposed removing Russian and Moldovan from the list of protected languages. Nikita Poturaev, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy, wrote this on Facebook. 

"Yesterday (referring to October 29th – UNIAN), under pressure from Council of Europe officials and/or experts unknown to me (the European Commission's representatives for our EU membership negotiations on the 'first cluster' – respect for fundamental human rights and freedoms), Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration Taras Kachka and Chairman of the State Service for Ethnopolicy and Freedom of Conscience Viktor Yelenskyi were forced to withdraw government bill No. 14120 from consideration by the Verkhovna Rada," he wrote. 

According to him, this is already the second time this has happened, because the government already submitted the document the first time and was forced to withdraw it in 2024 "under the same pressure from Brussels and Strasbourg."

He also wrote that the Council of Europe is "pulling the 'Russian world' into Ukraine" and "spitting" on the graves of Holocaust and Mariupol victims. 

Poturaev notes that the government bill proposed removing Russian and Moldovan from the list of protected languages, replacing the "Jewish language" with Hebrew and Yiddish, and adding the Czech language to the protected list (previously, Czech had not been there).  

"The new list would look like this: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Gagauz, Crimean Tatar, Modern Greek, German, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Hungarian, Czech, Hebrew, and, according to the amendments of the Verkhovna Rada Committee, Yiddish, Urum, and Rumei. As we can see, Russian is not on this list—and rightly so, since it should not be there by definition. Russian is the official language of a huge aggressor country; it is not the language of some small, vulnerable group, and therefore does not require the protection of the Charter (referring to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages—UNIAN)," he added.

The Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee believes that Ukrainian officials were blackmailed by the idea that "reducing the list of protected languages" would block negotiations on Ukraine's EU membership. 

 

Poturaev believes that Ukraine must correct the Charter translation scam and remove Russian from the list of languages ​​requiring support. 

 

 "This will restore historical justice and remove a tool for Kremlin manipulation. If they're hinting that, in order to gain EU membership, we must leave everything as is—that is, essentially granting the language of the criminal 'Russian world' special protection—then the question arises: do we need this kind of Europe, and does it need us?" he notes.

 

As of October 30, 2025, the government bill 14120 "On Amendments to Certain Laws of Ukraine in Connection with the Update of the Official Translation of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages" is listed on the parliament's official website as having the status of having received a conclusion from the relevant Committee for consideration in the session hall. 

 

As UNIAN reported, in August 2025, Language Ombudsman Olena Ivanovska called for the Law of Ukraine "On the Ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages" to be aligned with the provisions of the updated translation of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs approved in January 2024. This includes updating the list of languages ​​in need of support and special protection. 

 

It is noted that due to the inaccurate translation of the Charter, Russia has accused Ukraine for years of failing to comply with its international obligations and has also been able to exploit this for political manipulation aimed at undermining the status of Ukrainian as the state language. 

 

She emphasized that the Russian language does not need our protection and that “when Crimean Tatar and Karaite stand next to Russian, it is paradoxical.”"