Ukraine Has a Civil Rights Problem

During the latter half of 2022, when Ukrainian victory over Russia seemed a distinct possibility, voices questioning Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s domestic policies were sparse. Today, however, while outright criticism of Kyiv’s military strategy remains taboo, we are beginning to see frank debate on Ukrainian social media about the country’s postwar future and who will be left to build it.

Ukrainians across the political spectrum—former officials, political allies to the current administration, longtime critics, and western Ukrainian intellectuals among them—are questioning the long-term social merits of wartime policies that effectively relegate Russian speakers to permanent second-class status. It should be noted that almost all of these critics reside in Ukraine and are fiercely supportive of Ukrainian independence. But they worry that the government is squandering its chance to forge a durable post-invasion social consensus by adopting policies that will alienate, criminalize, or deport a significant portion of the country’s population.

The debate over Ukraine’s freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and minority rights—about which very little is known in the West—reveals that even if Ukraine manages to win the war, it still has a long way to go in becoming a truly open and pluralistic society.

Freedom of religion is protected by the Ukrainian Constitution. But since the outset of war, this freedom has taken a sharp turn for the worse for groups symbolically linked to Moscow. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), one of the country’s largest denominations, has borne the greatest brunt of this crackdown. The Ukrainian government sees the church as an agent of Russian influence, despite the fact that the UOC cut administrative ties with the Russian Orthodox Church in 1990 and ended all formal canonical ties with it in May 2022.

Regardless, UOC property, assets, and holy sites have been seized even years before the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, and members of its clergy are being investigated for crimes against the state—many argue on trumped-up charges. In October 2023, Ukraine’s parliament took the first step toward banning the church entirely by approving a bill that bans religious groups “affiliated with centers of influence … located outside Ukraine, in the state conducting military aggression against Ukraine.”

The main lobbyist for the elimination of the traditional UOC has been its similarly named rival, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), which was founded in 2019 as a nationalist alternative to the UOC. In 2019, the Ministry of Culture issued a decree requiring the UOC to rename itself as the “Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine,” a thinly veiled—and largely unsuccessful—attempt to trigger mass defections.

Many have pointed out the legal, ethical, and theological problems with these moves. Surprisingly few, however, seem concerned about the domestic political turmoil that they might unleash. Framing the UOC as an illegal and hostile religious organization risks inciting violence against the church and its members. Kyiv University professor Andrei Baumeister has suggested that accentuating religious animosities at a time when the country so desperately needs unity could further erode public trust in the government, creating a slow-boiling “legitimacy deficit” that could explode five or even 10 years down the road.

Freedom of the press, and of political expression more generally, has taken a similar beating. A new media law, adopted in March 2023, extends the censorship purview of the National Council on Television and Radio Broadcasting beyond its namesake mediums to include print and online media. This eight-person body, appointed jointly by the president and by the parliament currently controlled by the president’s party, now has the authority to review the content of all Ukrainian media, prohibit content it deems a threat to the nation, and issue mandatory directives to media outlets.

In 2024, the council’s powers over language usage in the media are set to expand further. For example, as of January, the minimum percentage of Ukrainian language on television will increase from 75 to 90 percent; in July, the use of non-Ukrainian languages on television will be prohibited entirely in certain contexts. This law has been strongly criticized by journalist groups; Harlem Désir, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s representative on freedom of the media, called it “a blatant violation” of the freedom of speech.

Iconoclastic public philosopher Sergei Datsyuk has warned that the government’s efforts to ensure an indefinite monopoly on information will only lead to higher levels of public disaffection with political authority. He fears that they could eventually create such a high level of social tension within the Ukrainian polity that “it will be unclear which is more dangerous for us, war with Russia or internal civil war.” Oleksiy Arestovich, a former presidential advisor to Zelensky, has voiced similar concerns.

In Ukraine, the freedoms of religion and the press are deeply intertwined with the issue of minority rights, specifically with the treatment of the country’s largest minority, Russophile Ukrainians—those who identify with Russian heritage, be it through language, culture, history, or religion.

The vast majority of Russophile Ukrainians refuse to categorize themselves as a minority. They see themselves simply as Ukrainians citizens, and as such, they argue, they have a constitutional right to speak any language and espouse any religion or culture that they wish, not just the ones endorsed by the state. But Ukrainian law does not recognize Russians as indigenous to Ukraine, or even as a minority within Ukraine. They therefore have no claim to legal protection of their cultural heritage and language, a direct contradiction of Article 10 of the Ukrainian constitution.

In a now-infamous survey taken just six months before the Russian invasion, more than 40 percent of Ukrainians nationwide (and nearly two-thirds in the east and south), agreed with Russian President Vladimir Putin that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people.” Surveys taken since then show that this figure has fallen sharply, though even now, political analyst Kost Bondarenko estimates that at least 8 to 10 percent of Ukrainians can be considered “pro-Russian.”

This precipitous drop has encouraged Ukraine’s more nationalistic lawmakers to think of new ways to transform these problematic citizens into proper Ukrainians, particularly in terms of language. A 2021 law fines the use of Russian in the service sector, while other laws have targeted Russian-language media, books, films, and music, even when they are produced in Ukraine. One way or another, according to Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, “the Russian language must completely disappear from our territory, it being an aspect of hostile propaganda and the brainwashing of our population.”

The tensions surrounding minority rights will only be exacerbated further once the war is over. As part of its accession negotiations with the European Union, in 2022, Ukraine passed a law outlining the rights of national minorities, but it specifically exempted Russian speakers from protection during the period of martial law and five years thereafter.

Although the EU had asked that this latter period be shortened, the final version, recently signed into law, while significantly expanding minority language rights for official languages of the EU, eliminates them entirely for Russian.

Most of these restrictive laws were first proposed well before 2022. But since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, their implementation has been accelerated to hasten what nationalists like to call the start of a new “post-colonial” era of Ukrainian history. However, this transition is likely to be a long, costly, and dangerous process.

While there has been a sharp spike in anti-Russian sentiment during the war, prominent scholar Ella Libanova has argued that pro-Russian sentiments will inevitably rise again after it ends. Of course, no one can predict public opinion, especially if the war continues for several years.

One thing that seems certain, however, is that the populations of eastern and southern Ukraine, Russophile or not, will not take kindly to being made the scapegoats for this conflict and denied civil and political rights en masse. The extent of what is being contemplated by Ukrainian lawmakers is staggering. According to Tamila Tasheva, Zelensky’s representative in Crimea, if it were liberated tomorrow, at least 200,000 residents of Crimea would face collaboration charges, and another 500,000 to 800,000 residents would face deportation. Refat Chubarov, the chairman of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatars, says that more than 1 million people—more than half the current population—will have to leave “immediately.”

It would be a mistake, therefore, to imagine that the unity forged in battle has healed all the wounds of the past. As Bondarenko put it, “We are fighting against Russia, but that does not mean we are fighting for Ukraine. That is the problem; that is the calamity.”

All Ukrainians agree that to bring this calamity to an end, normalcy must be restored. But that is where the consensus ends, for if normalcy means better relations with Russia, then it is precisely what Ukrainian nationalists and Western governments fear most. For the latter, it would mean the failure of a decadeslong policy to lure Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence into that of the West. For the former, it would mean the failure of what Ukraine’s first language ombudsman, Tatyana Monakhova, called the nationalist dream: “The dream was always to cultivate, build, or construct a powerful, homogeneous Ukrainian monolith—a society of the like-minded, who speak the state language, having no disagreements on major issues of state.”

Both of these approaches ignore what most Ukrainians actually want: policies that treat all Ukrainians with dignity and afford them equal protection under the law. But this cannot occur, Datsyuk said, so long as the government regards as its enemy not only Russia proper, but also those whom it has labeled “incorrect Ukrainians.” This has created a situation in which, as Ukrainian political commentator Andrei Zolotaryov has noted, “a significant part of the citizenry is in internal emigration and does not consider the state to be theirs. This is a very big problem in a country waging war.”

Ukraine needs a better path, and finding it is not an issue of money or international support. It is a matter of bringing about internal healing so that Ukrainians of all religious, linguistic, ethnic, and political backgrounds can forge a common bond of civic identity. Such an identity can only begin to take shape, however, if the many sub-identities that already exist within Ukraine are allowed to contribute to it. This means abandoning the isolationist calls that “Ukraine is for Ukrainians” and, instead, embracing the possibility of Ukraine becoming a truly open and pluralistic society.

Like all ideologues, Ukrainian nationalists are trapped by the fear that allowing diversity within their carefully constructed society will mean the loss of national unity. But research from international relations professors Barry Buzan and Ole Waever suggests that when a state enshrines the right to diversity, it is able to guide that diversity in ways that can actually reinforce national unity. Nation-states with diverse populations do much better if they permit “a concept of politics detached from the state, and for circumstances in which identity politics [is] about maintaining difference rather than finding a collective image.”

The very fact that resistance to forcible Ukrainianization in education, language usage, internet media, and music has persisted, even as Ukraine struggles desperately for survival, should indicate beyond any doubt that Russophile Ukrainians do not intend to abandon either their state or their identity. Forcing them to choose between the two risks planting the seeds for civil conflict long after the war with Russia is done.

Correction, Dec. 22, 2023: A paragraph in a previous version of this article on the use of Russian in Ukraine today contained several inaccuracies and has been removed. It incorrectly summarized a September 2023 survey question on language discrimination as asking specifically about discrimination toward Russian speakers and stated that 18.3 percent of Ukrainian survey respondents still wanted Russian as an official language. In fact, that percentage of respondents said they would accept Russian as an official language were Russia to end its aggression in Ukraine.