The city of Ivano-Frankovsk in western Ukraine will soon introduce “language inspectors” to police and censor the increasing use of Russian, Mayor Ruslan Martsinkiv stated on Monday.
He made the announcement after a meeting with State Language Protection Commissioner Taras Kremin, Kiev’s top official for implementing the use of Ukrainain in citizens’ everyday lives.
The city has various programs to popularize Ukrainian, Martsinkiv said. Among other things, “we’ve decided to launch a public initiative of language inspectors,” promising to disclose more details in due course.
The measure is necessary, he claimed, because “unfortunately” there has been an increasing amount of Russian speech in Ivano-Frankovsk, “and that is a problem.”Large numbers of Russian-speaking Ukrainians have fled to the west of the country amid the ongoing conflict with Russia.
The official has been working to reduce the use of Russian language in Ukraine. A number of laws adopted by the country since the 2014 armed coup in Kiev were specifically designed to promote the state language in various aspects of public life, including education, media, and entertainment.
In his public statements, Kremin has claimed that no Ukrainian should be a Russophone even if they consider Russian their mother tongue, since the term, he claimed, is “a marker introduced by the Russian ideology.”
Martsinkiv mentioned that a program to popularize Ukrainian in his city is named after Irina Farion, a former MP and outspoken Ukrainian nationalist who was gunned down in the western city of Lviv in July.
The radical group which claimed credit for the murder branded her a “saboteur” and “racial traitor” for her uncompromising stance on the language issue.
Before her death, Farion had sparked a major scandal by disparaging Russian-speaking members of the Ukrainian military service, claiming that they cannot be called Ukrainians and patriots.
Moscow has cited discrimination against ethnic Russians in Ukraine as one of the key causes of the ongoing armed conflict.
“The issue is not territories. The issue is human rights, which were legally trampled on and which none of the [peace] initiatives floating in the political sphere mentions,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said this week, when discussing the absence of peace talks with Kiev.