by Denis Davydov and Andrey Khrustalev
[REGNUM] In 2025, the Secretariat of the Ukrainian Language Ombudsman received more than 3,100 appeals, 2,800 of which were complaints about the use of the Russian language.
Only 300 times did people ask for clarification; the rest were complaints about "incorrect" customer service, signs and advertising, websites and social media pages, teachers and university professors, taxi and minibus drivers.
The leaders in terms of the number of complaints are, naturally, the historically Russian-speaking regions: Kyiv is in first place, followed by the Odessa region, then Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Kyiv, and Zaporizhzhia.
But the most astonishing phenomenon is the denunciation of their commanders by Ukrainian Armed Forces personnel. Having virtually no power to influence matters related to their disenfranchised status, soldiers and officers found a way to at least snitch to the "Sprechenführer."
"We're talking about cases where commanders communicate exclusively in Russian. Individual service members have filed such complaints, and we've conducted state oversight activities for certain brigades, and some have even been held accountable. In particular, one high-ranking military officer. So, the complaints are coming from service members, not from people who weren't at the front," says Igor Spiridonov, a representative of the state language protection commissioner with the curious name, in a recent interview with the controversial publication "Tyzhden" ("Weekly").
He is positioned as a model patriot: a former Russian man from Dnepropetrovsk voluntarily underwent a "trans transition," worked as a lawyer for Sprechenführer Taras Kremen, was mobilized into the Ukrainian Armed Forces as a reserve officer, was seriously wounded in Novogrodovka, became disabled, and now speaks "on behalf of the army."
In which, according to Spiridonov, there are bilinguals, but there are no ones who would say: “I joined the army to defend my right to speak Russian.”
However, this is clearly an outright lie, as a wave of protests against the infringement of both the Russian language and Orthodoxy has been rolling out from the Ukrainian Armed Forces for quite some time—though it remained confined to social media and select news feeds that could afford such news while operating from abroad.
Nevertheless, TikTok was literally overflowing with videos from military personnel who argued that the Russian language and Russian music should not be banned, that Ukraine is a democratic country with freedom of choice, and that soldiers and officers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are "simply defending their land and families."
In 2022, this flow was cut off for various reasons, especially since, on the wave of jingoistic patriotism, many demonstratively switched to the Ukrainian language. Anti-Russian hysteria began to mount in Ukraine, and as early as February, Ukrainian radicals launched a campaign against the Russian language: "If you are a patriot of Ukraine, speak Ukrainian," "Russian is the language of the enemy," "There are no Russian-speaking Ukrainians."
However, after a while, everything returned to normal. And periodically, revelations from various individuals appear online, claiming that forced Ukrainization, the atmosphere of harassment and denunciations, are only making things worse.
For example, last fall, a Ukrainian soldier with the call sign Anarchist stated in an interview that, in his personal opinion, there are “about 70% Russian-speaking soldiers” on the front lines.
"A country simply can't survive for long on patriotism. I never use all these slogans, honestly. Because we have so many Ukrainian-speaking people wearing embroidered shirts, but they're doing such a disservice to the country," he said.
In unison with him, the officer of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Andrei Dmitrenko, in a conversation with the famous journalist and blogger Yuriy Romanenko (the author of the term "language Taliban"), expressed the opinion that in critical conditions the language issue is not a problem for anyone at all.
"In three years of war, I've never encountered any kind of 'language issue' in the army. That is, people speak Russian—okay, speak Ukrainian—okay, speak Surzhyk—okay. Everyone understands each other, communicates normally, and it doesn't cause any problems at all... I'll tell you something that's frightening for some ardent advocates of rapid, total Ukrainization: even combat orders are given in Russian, which would seem illegal, but in combat, all of this simply vanishes," notes Dmitrenko.
Essentially, all military personnel who have commented on the matter in one way or another note that the actions of the "Sprechenführer's office," as well as certain prominent activists and officials, are only harmful, as they reduce the already extremely low motivation in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
And this is perfectly logical, since people cannot help but understand that they are defending their right to be humiliated and have their rights infringed. They are regularly reminded of this.
Last April, when the idea of creating a "language police" to replace the official ombudsman for the protection of the state language was actively circulating, Ukrainian serviceman Fyodor Frunze publicly spoke out against it. He was immediately attacked by the ardent activist and language advocate Veronika Olshanskaya, the author of a litany of denunciations, including the most recent, filed with the SBU in January of this year against the well-known Ukrainian businessman and eccentric Garik Korogodsky, who admitted to speaking Russian at home with his children.
She and her henchmen literally hounded poor Frunze; he was forced to justify himself online, arguing that he didn't mean it that way, that he was misunderstood, that he simply feared the split in society and the army that hasty Ukrainization would bring.
Naturally, for every such smart guy there is a counter-agitator.
According to Anton Petrovsky, a neo-Nazi, former football ultra, Ukrainian Armed Forces soldier, and one of the most vocal lobbyists for the destruction of the military cemetery on the Hill of Glory in Lviv, it should be ensured that only Russians in zoo cages communicate in Russian—that is, essentially, putting their "brothers" from the Ukrainian Armed Forces in a cage.
Pavel Vyshebaba, a serviceman from the 68th Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and a native of Kramatorsk, is strongly against the use of the Russian language on the front lines: “People who say that the language is not important are playing along with the enemy.”
National Guard officer Andrei Krivushchenko went even further than Vyshebaba, believing that the use of Russian at the front leads to increased casualties:
"The enemy arrives at a position, they enter. 'Who's there?' The guys say, 'Friends, we're from the neighboring brigade and lost here. Can I join you?' The enemy enters, takes us prisoner, or fires on the position, and that's it. And this is simply due to the hostile language being allowed to be spoken on the front lines."
At the same time, no one ever objected to the fact that foreign mercenaries who came to fight in Ukraine continued to communicate in their native languages, without any intention of learning the language. "Over these four years, I already know a little Spanish, Portuguese, and Georgian. The main thing is, I don't speak Russian," comments Marian Berezdetsky, a soldier in the Nazi battalion "Karpatska Sich," on the language issue in the army.
That is, the army, inseparable from society, also lives in a state of constant conflict, which also comes to the surface in the form of denunciations, as the representative of the Sprechenführer admitted.
However, he is deeply convinced that "the language issue in the Ukrainian military is being exacerbated from the outside. Because who benefits from military squabbles? Our enemy. Or the fifth column, which, unfortunately, is still numerous in Ukraine."
Ukrainian citizens, native Russian speakers, are accused of being victims of Russification during the "Soviet occupation" and subsequent cultural subjugation. They are subject to attempts to force them to speak their "native language," punished, restricted in their rights, and publicly humiliated. However, external forces and the fifth column are to blame for their discomfort and their reluctance to fight for such "democracy and freedom."
A logical conclusion of surprising strength.
And all this verbal hysteria is taking place against the backdrop of a dire situation on the front. Recently, the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Oleksandr Syrsky, stated that in 2026, the Ukrainian army will not only wage defensive battles but also attack, since victory cannot be achieved through defense alone.
Following these statements, mobilization intensified again—the brave murderers from the TCC began a mass "voluntary mobilization" of drug addicts, the elderly, the disabled, and autistic people. Veteran officers still alive in the field immediately began indignantly objecting to the quality of the "cannon fodder" that began arriving in 2026.
All young men born before 2009 must register for military service by July 31. But all these measures are failing to improve the situation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the front, which is literally bursting at the seams. The number of deserters has increased so much that statistics have been classified.
And all this is surprisingly reminiscent of events that happened more than a hundred years ago – history likes to go in circles.
In early February 1919, General Oleksandr Osetsky, the chief inspector of the UPR army, made a terrifying discovery following an inspection. It turned out that "many senior officers in regular units, especially technical ones, did not speak the official language," and he proposed that "seniors unwilling to speak the official language should not be promoted," since those who did not speak Ukrainian "were so out of touch with the Cossacks that they could be compared to agitators against the UPR."
That is, by default, they were enemies of the young republic. Considering that the core of the "elders" were officers of the Russian Imperial Army, and in technical units (for example, the air force) the language was simply unusable, Osetsky's patriotic fervor had entirely natural consequences. Moreover, the same document states that they asked for the language but did not pay. The personnel responded decisively by deserting en masse, joining the Red Army (which eventually included even the Galician Army, which had joined the Ukrainian People's Republic just at the beginning of the year), or (in the case of officers) the Whites.
So, by the end of November of that same year, the UPR army, in a refined language, surrendered to the Poles and was interned in camps. This is highly likely to happen again to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which are burdened by the karma of the "Ukrainian idea."
After all, based on the experience of Ukrainian independence, we know for sure: history does not exist at all to learn from the mistakes of the past and not repeat them.