Bill 7633 on the restriction of the use of Russian text sources in Ukrainian research and education: analysing language policy in times of war

For centuries, Ukraine has been a site of conflicts over language rights. During 70 years of Soviet leadership, Ukraine experienced’relentless Russification’ (Reznik in Language of conflict: discourses of the Ukrainian crisis (pp. 169–191). Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2020 p. 170). After breaking from Soviet rule, the Ukrainian language became an increasingly powerful symbol and means of national identity. Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the language issues have gained yet more public and political attention. Addressing the urgency, the Ukrainian parliament adopted, in the first reading, Bill 7633, aiming to restrict the use of any Russian sources in Ukrainian school and academia, a bill that was met with criticism and experienced intensified debates. This article analyses a range of text sources (both governmental and non-governmental) debating Bill 7633, using Discourse Analysis, and reveals how ‘liberal values’ and ‘lived liberalism’ (Fedirko et al. in Social Anthropol/Anthropol soc 29(2):373–386, 2021) are practiced or violated through problematising or justifying the Bill. Thus, the article contributes to the (recently emerged, i.e. since the start of Russian annexation of the Crimea in 2014) body of research on political and public discourses of the Ukrainian conflict (Epstein in Studies in East Eur Thought 74(4), 475–481; Jones, 2020; Lanvers and Lunyova in Eur J Lang Policy 15(1), 25–68; Slobozhan et al. in Soc Netw Anal Min 12(1), 1–12, 2022). Results show a comprehensive range of arguments both for and against Bill 7633 in both governmental and non-governmental texts which is interpreted as a form of liberalism in fragments (Fedirko in Social Anthropol/Anthropol Soc, 29(2), 471–489, 2021). The conclusion debates the unreserved applicability of western conceptualisation of liberal language policy in the context of war and prolonged linguistic contestations.