Міхаель Мозер Мовна політика на тимчасово окупованих територіях України (2014–2025 рр.) 2

DOI 10.33190/0027-2833-346-2026-1-001

Institut für Slawistik, Universität Wien
Spitalgasse 2-4, Hof 3, A-1090 Wien, Austria
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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3693-1291

 2.4. The ongoing mystery of «classical Ukrainian»

As early as 2022, Russia presented its remedy for the «bad» and «corrupt» Ukrainian language: the development of a «superior Ukrainian» language, or «classical Ukrainian», fabricated in the Russian Federation (Moser 2023). On August 31, 2022, Russian Minister of Education Sergey Kravtsov officially introduced the concept to Putin, declaring that pupils would have the opportunity to learn Ukrainian as their native language if parents and educators so decided. He also announced that a textbook on «classical Ukrainian» was being prepared and would be finished by the end of 2022 (see: the YouTube video with Kravtsov; note Putin’s facial expression in Glava 2022). Subsequently, Russian opinion makers discussed establishing an institution to regulate the use of Ukrainian in Russia (Moser 2023).

Early debates in the Russian media anticipated the subsequent discourse (ibid.). Some argued that Ukrainian should be purified because it had been deliberately contaminated at all linguistic levels by Ukrainian nationalists. Others de­clared that «classical Ukrainian» was unnecessary because Ukrainian was merely a Russian dialect belonging to the past (ibid.). Some discussants opined that «clas­sical Ukrainian» was «more or less Taras Shevchenko’s language», while others referred to the term as the Ukrainian language of the Soviet period.

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