News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Does the Tank Have a Future? by whimsicalism on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @04:01PM (#31758659)
It is illegal to have government communication in Russian or to have a Russian language radio station in Ukraine. I would call that banning Russian language from some aspects of public life.
Re:Does the Tank Have a Future? by thraway11 on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @04:42PM (#31759206)
Do you have a link for this? I hadn't heard about the Russian language being banned. I did know about this from 2019:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-parliament-langua...

"The new legislation requires TV and film distribution firms to ensure 90 percent of their content is in Ukrainian and for the proportion of Ukrainian-language printed media and books to be at least 50 percent."

It also says civil servants must speak Ukrainian. It does not say they can't also speak Russian.

In any case, that's not a ban.

Re:Does the Tank Have a Future? by whimsicalism on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @06:43PM (#31760359)
It is illegal for any business to offer services or communicate in Russian unless the customer explicitly asks. It is illegal to have Russian language newspapers or schools, all of which existed before the crackdown.

Turkey has done the same thing to Kurdish speakers and most of the West has rightfully condemned their attempts to crack down on the language.

Re:Does the Tank Have a Future? by int_19h on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @08:56PM (#31761376)
It's legal to use Russian as the primary instruction language in schools for the first 5 years. After that, they have to switch to Ukrainian, but they can still continue to teach Russian as a foreign language class (same as English etc).

On the whole, I'd say that Ukrainian language policies are more akin to Quebec. OTOH Turkey has been packing its prisons with Kurds until recently for crimes such as "insulting Turkishness", so no, it's not really a valid comparison. I don't like the laws on this subject in either Ukraine or in Quebec (or really any place that tries to force cultural cohesion), but specifics do matter.