Even if you aren’t Ukrainian, it is still likely that you took part in a small language revolution after the invasion of Ukraine. A lot of us altered our pronunciation and spelling of the Ukrainian capital city, Kyiv, following Russia’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, when news outlets rapidly published pieces recommending we call the city Kyiv, not Kiev. “Kiev” transliterates its Russian name and pronunciation, ending in more of an “eh” than an “ee.” In the 20th century, Soviet power and delicious chicken Kievs ossified this pronunciation for most of the Western world, and this, Ukrainians argue, is textbook Russification: the ongoing attempts of the Russian government to acculturate Ukrainians into its Russo-sphere.

Even though the Ukrainian government had long attempted to change this exonym with the Twitter hashtag #KyivNotKiev, it was Russia’s assault that gave the West the most convincing impetus for word change. All of us who have pronounced Kyiv correctly since have fired a shell over the linguistic frontline—including some British supermarkets, which renamed the classic dish “chicken Kyiv.” In the meantime, Russia has steamrolled through Ukrainian sovereign territory with an unparalleled destruction of its language; wherever it has occupied since 2022, it has dismantled Ukrainian-language road signs, imposed Russian as the language of instruction and public life, and even seized and destroyed Ukrainian books. Ukrainians have reacted to this viscerally, from ordinary people all the way up to the top of government. This ongoing conflict reveals not only how languages become weapons of war, but how an occupied country may respond when it has its language, as well as its nation, to defend.

Even if you aren’t Ukrainian, it is still likely that you took part in a small language revolution after the invasion of Ukraine. A lot of us altered our pronunciation and spelling of the Ukrainian capital city, Kyiv, following Russia’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, when news outlets rapidly published pieces recommending we call the city Kyiv, not Kiev. “Kiev” transliterates its Russian name and pronunciation, ending in more of an “eh” than an “ee.” In the 20th century, Soviet power and delicious chicken Kievs ossified this pronunciation for most of the Western world, and this, Ukrainians argue, is textbook Russification: the ongoing attempts of the Russian government to acculturate Ukrainians into its Russo-sphere.

Even though the Ukrainian government had long attempted to change this exonym with the Twitter hashtag #KyivNotKiev, it was Russia’s assault that gave the West the most convincing impetus for word change. All of us who have pronounced Kyiv correctly since have fired a shell over the linguistic frontline—including some British supermarkets, which renamed the classic dish “chicken Kyiv.” In the meantime, Russia has steamrolled through Ukrainian sovereign territory with an unparalleled destruction of its language; wherever it has occupied since 2022, it has dismantled Ukrainian-language road signs, imposed Russian as the language of instruction and public life, and even seized and destroyed Ukrainian books. Ukrainians have reacted to this viscerally, from ordinary people all the way up to the top of government. This ongoing conflict reveals not only how languages become weapons of war, but how an occupied country may respond when it has its language, as well as its nation, to defend.

Today, one way that Ukraine fights back against Russification is with a broad revitalization program for the Ukrainian language, which until recently was led by Taras Kremin. He was wearing a half-zip, bright blue fleece when we spoke via video call, with an enormous Ukrainian flag behind him. He sees the Académie Française as his French counterpart, a comparison he also extends to Germany’s Goethe Institute and the United Kingdom’s British Council. Together, they are all members of the European Federation of National Institutions for Language, which has 39 member organizations.

Yet while the Académie Française is notorious for furiously defending the French language with its prescriptivism, imposing rules on how it should be used, the Ukrainian system works differently. As Kremin puts it, he’s not laying down the law: “I want to underline: I am not a policeman. We collect this information for the next steps.”

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Long before Kremin was a politician, he was a university professor, with a Ph.D. in Ukrainian literature and philology. Before that he was a poet, like his father, Dmytro, a significant figure in post-World War II experimentalism who was determined to teach children Ukrainian and who engaged with his friends in samvydav, the publishing of books forbidden by the Kremlin. I learned about him from one of his poetry collections beautifully translated by Svetlana Lavochkina. “Kremin means ‘flint’ in Ukrainian,” she writes in its introduction, pointing out it’s a real name, not a nom de plume or nom de guerre. “Flint: a fire starter, a hunting spear tip, a blade—all precise metaphors for Kremin’s work.” Apparently, Dmytro Kremin’s early poetry, which he wrote when still a teenager, was criticized for being foggy, to which he retorted: “If the readers think my work is foggy, it needs to be clarified whose brain the fog has befallen, mine or theirs.” He frequently appeals to the traditions that surround him—the Bible, ancient Greece, Slavic mythology—to cast Ukraine as a crucified, long-suffering nation. Occasionally his flint comes out: In one poem he declares that “Ukraine will never kneel, / Unless for prayer.”

Dmytro Kremin died in 2019, before the current invasion. When I ask his son what poetry he likes to write, he immediately says: “About Ukraine. My Mykolaiv region, the Black Sea region. My parents, my wife, my daughter. And about our Ukrainian victory!” Like father, like son. He owes his Ukrainian language skill to his father, as his region and education was, in his words, entirely “Russified.” Following the Maidan revolution in 2014, when he became a member of Parliament, he immediately focused on education, particularly “enforcement of the right to education for persons residing in the temporarily occupied territory.” And from 2020 to 2025, he held the position of State Language Protection Commissioner, the second person ever to have that title. In that role, he was not a civil servant and acted independently of government.

The state language law that created Taras Kremin’s job was introduced in 2019. It was pushed hard by Ukrainian politicians for security as much as cultural reasons. Kremin doesn’t spend every day wondering which new Anglicism to berate. He’s too busy enforcing the complex state law. Without going into all 49 pages of it here, it ensures that all Ukrainians are taught Ukrainian at school and asks that everyone in Ukraine become proficient in the language. New citizens will be expected to demonstrate an appropriate proficiency in Ukrainian, either immediately or within a year of acquiring citizenship.

An enormous number of professions require proficiency in Ukrainian as part of the law, including all politicians, as well as military officers, bank staff, anyone in state education or medicine, and lawyers. Cultural and artistic announcements and posters must be produced in the state language, and foreign language shows must always offer a Ukrainian translation. Publishers are obliged to produce at least 50 percent of their titles in Ukrainian, and websites registered in Ukraine must also have a Ukrainian version, along with any other languages they may support. Foreign websites that serve Ukrainians must load in Ukrainian by default on their browsers. The law also preserves the right for people from Indigenous groups and national minorities to be guaranteed the right to study their native language via schools or cultural societies. Tatar and minority languages recognized by the European Union are examples of language communities that may benefit from this; Russian does not benefit, having had its status as a protected language removed by the Ukrainian government in 2025.

Kremin’s duty is to determine whether or not these language laws are being abided by. He is obliged to make annual reports and to present them to the public, as well as forward his concerns to other commissions and administrations who may then conduct internal investigations or discipline entities or individuals for violations. In 2021, he produced a long report on the violations documented in Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk after Russia’s 2014 takeover of those regions. In Crimea, the number of pupils studying Ukrainian at school had plummeted from more than 12,000 before the annexation to 214 in the 2020-21 academic year, with just one school left in the region teaching the language. In 2019, the International Court of Justice ordered Russia to ensure the right of Ukrainians in Crimea to be educated in Ukrainian. Nothing changed.

Ukrainian newspapers, television stations, and websites in the region were still shut down or blocked, and human rights groups reported that occupying forces were forbidding musicians from singing in Ukrainian on Crimean radio stations. A Ukrainian cultural center set up shortly after the occupation found its staff repeatedly detained, interrogated, threatened, and fined. Larysa Kitayska, an activist who was arrested for “spreading hatred and enmity,” told Ukrainian media that “the oppression of the Ukrainian language in Crimea can now be seen in everything. If you communicate in Ukrainian, some people laugh, others look at you with disdain, especially visitors from Russia.” When she appeared in court, the authorities wouldn’t give her a Ukrainian interpreter, a violation of her rights under Article 74 of the Geneva Convention.

In Donetsk and Luhansk, Russian was declared the state language soon after Russia occupied the territories in 2014, and by 2017, the language of instruction in all schools switched to Russian. Without Ukrainian language skills, the students graduating from Donetsk and Luhansk high schools will now not be able to enter Ukrainian universities, keeping them from reintegrating into Ukrainian society; many learn it on the side with private teachers or on YouTube. Svitlana, a woman in Luhansk, told Deutsche Welle that the only way for her children to study Ukrainian at their school would be to attend a class at 7 a.m. that only lasts 20 minutes and is obviously scheduled at a time to deter most learners. “The children themselves say: Rather than learning Ukrainian like this, it is better not to teach it at school at all,” Svitlana said. She added that her daughter was now teaching herself: “She said it is better than treating the language so negligently and humiliating it.”

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Kremin generally finds himself busiest not with these regions but with disciplining Kyiv. Year after year, Kyiv receives the most language law complaints, which are generally made either by citizens, human rights organizations, or the police. Ukraine’s open data service shared a report in October 2024, listing the number of violations in the year so far, and Kyiv received 706, or 39 percent of the complaints. Kremin called it a “problem city” because it receives citizens fleeing from the war in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Mykolaiv, where Russian is likely to be their first language. “Next is Odesa and Kharkiv,” he told me, with 326 and 149 complaints respectively.

Although Kremin doesn’t identify as a policeman, 64 fines were issued in the year up to October 2024 for violations, the vast majority of which consisted of websites not being accessible in Ukrainian. Considering Russia’s considerable disinformation machine, Ukraine is right to be worried about Russian-only websites that are trying to post online within Ukraine. In 2024, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism reported that Ukrainians get more of their news from social media than any of the other 24 European countries cited in the report. Digital and grassroots media could adapt quickly, whereas traditional channels, disrupted by war and having their TV towers bombed by Russia, had to defer to the online world to get information out rapidly. Reliance on the internet for news is wonderful for accessibility, but it becomes a major vulnerability in an information war.

With all of these complaints and violations collected in one place, Kremin is hopeful that his reports will support Ukraine’s international human rights claims and help prove “language genocide,” as he puts it. There is no international crime of linguicide, but evidence of linguistic discrimination may help the Ukrainian government build its argument that Russia is committing genocide in international forums.

At the time of writing, many of these cases are active, including two interstate cases between Russia and Ukraine. In June 2024, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) found Russia guilty in one of them of systematic violations of human rights in Crimea “beyond a reasonable doubt,” something Moscow has repeatedly denied. Russia is no longer an ECHR member, nor does it have a remotely positive track record of responding to such rulings with meaningful change. However, the ECHR can still have an effect in dealing the kind of reputational damage that worsens sanctions and further deteriorates international relations, even if it cannot legally enforce what it has prescribed. Cases can be brought by individuals as well as by states, and as of February 2025, there were 9,264 individual applications against Russia from citizens in Crimea and other occupied or war-ridden areas. Similarly, the investigations of the International Criminal Court have already culminated in an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But, of course, rights continue to be violated, and territory continues to be occupied. The war has not stopped, and so Kremin—and now his successor, Olena Ivanovska—has to keep documenting violations.