Not that long ago, Ukrainians spoke and read mostly in the Russian language, even if they knew Ukrainian.

In the 60s, novelist Andrey Kurkov writes, “If someone on the street spoke Ukrainian, people thought they were from the village, or some strange intellectual, or maybe even a Ukrainian nationalist. . . . [H]aving Ukrainian as your first language was considered by many as a handicap.”

Today, after 100 days of war, “[o]nline and in casual conversations Ukrainian patriots increasingly refer to Russian as the ‘language of the enemy.’ Those who endorse this rhetoric would prefer to ignore the fact that up to 40 percent of Ukrainians speak Russian as their mother tongue. However, if some of them no longer want to speak Russian, many more no longer want to talk about it.”