MOSCOW, September 1 (RIA Novosti) - The self-proclaimed eastern Ukrainian republics of Donetsk and Luhansk are demanding that the Kiev government guarantee their right to use Russian as an official language.
“The president, the government and the Verkhovna Rada [parliament] must adopt legislative documents… guaranteeing the right of the people’s republics to use Russian as the official language,” the republics said in their joint negotiations’ statement.
The talks between Russia, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), with participation of the representatives from southeastern Ukraine, are being held on Monday in the capital of Belarus - Minsk.
In 2012, Ukraine adopted a law “On State Language Policy,” allowing the country’s regions to adopt the languages spoken by more than 10 percent of population, as their second official languages. When the law came to power, 13 out of 27 Ukrainian regions chose to adopt Russian and two regions introduced Hungarian and Romanian. In February, the Ukrainian Parliament abolished the law but this decision was subsequently vetoed by Oleksandr Turchynov, the country’s acting President at the time.
According to the last Ukrainian Census, about 75 percent of the population of the Donetsk Region and about 69 percent of the population of the Luhansk Region spoke Russian as their native language.
The current Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has repeatedly stated that Ukrainian language must remain the only official language in Ukraine. However, he said that allowing regions to determine the special status of the Russian language would be a reasonable compromise.
