KYIV, Ukraine—At a Kyiv bookstore one recent evening, two dozen adult students took turns explaining why they were brushing up on their country’s official tongue.
Among them were Kyiv natives who had never mastered Ukrainian and refugees from Russian-speaking front-line towns pummeled by Russian rockets.
“I no longer want to use the language of the aggressor country,” said graphic designer Natalia Nykyforova, speaking hesitantly in Ukrainian. “The problem is I still think in it.”
Russian President
launched his invasion of Ukraine in February with a pledge to defend Russian speakers. His war is instead pushing Ukrainians across the country to switch languages, accelerating a broader effort to cast off the legacy of Russian imperial rule. Since Russia seized Crimea and covertly invaded its neighbor’s east in 2014, Ukraine has toppled statues of Lenin, renamed streets and sidelined the once-dominant Russian language.
It is one of several consequences that Mr. Putin’s invasion was specifically intended to avert. His army now occupies 20% of Ukrainian territory, but Finland and Sweden are closing in on membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the U.S. has bolstered its military presence in Europe.
“You’re doing everything so that our people turn away from Russian,” Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky,
who grew up speaking Russian, said in a March video address. “Because the Russian language will be associated precisely with you, and only you, with those explosions and murders, with your crimes.”
Svitlana Lukach teaches a Ukrainian language class for Russian speakers in central Kyiv.
Svitlana Lukach, a professor of Ukrainian who teaches the free course at the Kyiv bookstore, says she has 200 students and a waiting list of people wanting to join.
“I’m not able to fight on the front line,” she said in an interview this week before teaching three consecutive, hourlong classes. “So I do my part like this instead.”
Ukrainian and Russian both use Cyrillic script and share a similar vocabulary and…
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