Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, June 20, 2023

Official Report 1073KB pdf

Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader is Tetiana Balanova, community co-ordinator, Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain in Edinburgh.

Presiding Officer and members of the Scottish Parliament, thank you for the opportunity to address you today.

I want to tell you about a country that is fighting for its right to exist. Ukrainians are being killed, tortured and raped, and our cities and homes are being destroyed. Russia is trying to erase us as a nation. It has been trying to assimilate our language and culture for decades.

When Ukrainian territories came under the control of the Russian empire, the printing of books in Ukrainian was forbidden and it was ordered that all state documents were to be rewritten in Russian. The process of the so-called Russification of Ukraine began.

Over the past 400 years, the Ukrainian language has been banned 134 times. The Stalinist terror of the late 1920s and 1930s, when prominent linguists and scientists were sent to labour camps or shot, went down in history under the name of the “executed renaissance”. No language has ever experienced such terrible destruction and persecution as Ukrainian.

For all nations, language is a means of communication. However, for us, because of Russian state propaganda, it is a sign of nationalism and separatism, and the cause of conflicts and moral trauma.

In the 21st century, the struggle for the chance to speak Ukrainian remains. Russia’s military forces strike missiles at our schools and theatres. They believe that, if somebody can speak Russian, they are their property. People speaking the Russian language in Ukraine gives Russia a reason to constantly encroach on our territory. That is why we abandon everything related to Russia—especially its language.

With the beginning of the war, some words changed their meaning. Here, if you see a clear sky, you will probably think about good weather; for Ukrainians, a clear sky is the all-clear signal. When you hear the word “arrival”, you will think about a plane landing; for Ukrainians, it means the coming of Russian missiles whose targets are civilians. The casual “How are you?” in Ukrainian—“Yak ty?”—has become a new way of saying, “I love you and I care about you.”

For all of us, speaking the Russian language in Ukraine ended with the attacks on Bucha, Mariupol and Kharkiv, and hundreds of other cities that have been similarly attacked. After hundreds of years of repression, speaking Ukrainian today is a conscious act of decolonisation.

Protect your mother language, speak it and teach it to your children, because language disappears—not because it is not taught by others but because it is not spoken by those who know it.

Ukraine was, Ukraine is, and Ukraine will be. Slava Ukraini!