Ukraine language law debate spills into UN Security Council

A clash over a new Ukrainian language law played out in the U N Security Council, where Ukrainian and Russian representatives sparred over whether the legislation promotes Ukrainian unity or jeopardizes the interests of the country's Russian-speaking population.

The discussion came amid political transition in Ukraine and hopes for progress in resolving conflicts that has flared there over the last five years.

Tuesday's back-and-forth reflected longstanding divisions in the council over Russia's 2014 annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and Moscow's support for separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine. Russia denies involvement in fighting there that has killed more than 13,000 people.

Both Ukrainian and Russian are widely spoken in Ukraine, and many residents use both languages.

Ukrainian Ambassador Volodymyr Yelchenko even pointedly made some remarks in Russian during Tuesday's meeting. Still, Ukraine's linguistic divide has long been a point of political contention in the country of 45 million.

The issue heated up after a Russia-friendly Ukrainian president was ousted amid protests in 2014. Russian officials and media fanned fears that Ukraine's new pro-Western government would force Ukrainian on residents of predominantly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, and pro-Russian separatists took control of parts of the region.

Russia requested Tuesday's discussion of the new language law, which passed this spring. It requires the use of Ukrainian in government and media, while Russian can be used in personal communications.

"The biased Ukrainian authorities have undertaken to eradicate" Russian, complained Moscow's U N ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia. He argued that the language rule undermines Security-Council-endorsed initiatives to end the conflict in Ukraine.

"The struggle for the conservation of national and cultural identity should not devolve into an encroachment upon the Russian-language-speaking people of the country," he said.

Ukraine's envoy countered that the language law was an internal matter that didn't warrant the council's scrutiny, and that Russia particularly should stay out of it.

"A country that for centuries suppressed the Ukrainian language, and forcefully replaced it with the Russian in all spheres of public life, is not in a position to tell us now what language we should speak and write," Yelchenko said in English.

Later, as he and Nebenzia traded rebuttals, Yelchenko used Russian, saying it was appropriate to the meeting's "fabricated topic."