Belarus to de-Russify schools, ready to defend against invasion

And the reason for the current struggle is that we just simply have not established a fully-sustainable Ukrainian-speaking society after the fall of the USSR. Like the one you would get recommended to dive into while learning a new language (e.g. go to Britain to surround yourself with an English-speaking environment). Whether it is the result of the Russian policy of 'unfriendly steps' whenever you try to do something they don't approve or/and our unconscious politicians, but you won't be able to do that in Ukraine, there'll always be contacts with Russian, no matter how hard you try, or what you choose. You can't just say "OK, now I consume media-content only in Ukrainian", or "I want to watch my TV in Ukrainian only and never hear Russian", or "I want my kid to get education in Ukrainian" and do so. There's no choice/or you will face tremendous difficulties in most parts of the country. Moreover, since Russian is a widespread language (thank you, centuries of repressions and occupations throughout the world), which is considered international, and in which international companies actually care to localize their products to, and since there has been almost zero intention to improve our English courses in schools in the 90s, right now more and more young Ukrainians choose Russian instead of English as that big and developed language which they use to get access to media-content/internet-forums/whatever, further stifling their usage of Ukrainian.

The type of russification we get now is not the same with the one we've had under the Russian Empire, which meant outright bans of Ukrainian. You can name it as a 'gentle' one. The core principle is to slowly, but surely increase the amount of Russian in life of an average Ukrainian to not provoke a rejection, at the same time creating such an environment in which using Ukrainian becomes harder and harder to the point when it's just easier for you to switch to Russian and never go back to Ukrainian since there's no need for it. It's basically passive Ukrainian colonial mentality of acceptance vs aggressive Russian one. The justification of the increasing amount of Russian usually comes under the pretext of 'tolerance to minority languages' and that you should not 'divide the country with your filthy language problems'. Talking about our TV-channels again. Because of the lack of the regulation, over time, TV-channels, especially the ones owned by Russian companies, have started to show more and more cheap Russian TV-content. Everyone was OK with that in the beginning since people were used to some amount of Russian under the USSR. But since time has passed, we now find ourselves with channels whose air-time consists with more than 50% of Russian content. And when people start to ask questions such as 'Why the hell are we watching shitty Russian TV-series about corruption and their mafia?' or 'Why am I watching movies in Russian in a country with Ukrainian as a state language?' the Russians both outside and inside Ukraine usually rant about how we should 'tolerate the language', or 'Are you a nationalist?', or even 'What are you? A fascist?!?'. The same happens with other parts of our daily lives where Russians have a major stake in. It's basically 'slowly grab and capitalize', and then bawl to the world how evil Ukrainian nazi want to ban poor oppressed Russian language which has 300 mil. speakers and which they have been artificially implanting into different cultures for the past 300 years.

/r/europe Thread Link - kyivpost.com