Law On Ukraine State Language Comes Into Force
By RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service
KYIV -- The law on Ukraine's state language came into force on July 16, two months after former President Petro Poroshenko endorsed it days before leaving office.
The Law on Securing Ukrainian Language as the State Language declares Ukrainian "the only official state language in Ukraine."
It says "attempts" to introduce other languages as the state language would be considered attempts to "forcibly change the constitutional order."
The new law defines what it calls the "public humiliation of the Ukrainian language" as a punishable offense under the country's Criminal Code.
It introduces mandatory language quotas for state and private television broadcasts and says at least half of the text in printed media must be in Ukrainian.
Public posts that require fluency in Ukrainian include the presidency, the position of parliament speaker, as well as all lawmakers, ministers, the head of the state security service, the prosecutor-general, the chief of the Ukrainian National Bank, and local council members.
Ukrainian becomes mandatory in all official documents, court records, elections and referendums, international treaties, and labor agreements,.
The law says language rules would not apply to private conversations or religious rituals.
Ukrainian is the native language of some 67 percent of Ukraine's almost 45 million population, while Russian is the native language of almost 30 percent. Russian is spoken mostly in urban areas. Almost 3 percent of Ukraine's inhabitants are native speakers of other languages.
Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine claim Kyiv is deliberately curtailing the use of the Russian language.
Ukraine's new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who was inaugurated on May 20, has criticized the law as a set of "prohibitions and punishments" that will complicate bureaucratic procedures and "increase the number of officials instead of reducing them."
This ends our live blogging for Monday, July 15. Be sure to check back tomorrow for our continuing coverage.
Russian, Ukrainian Officials Discuss Prisoner Swap
Russian and Ukrainian officials say they are holding talks on a major prisoner swap just days after their countries' presidents discussed the conflict in eastern Ukraine and a possible prisoner exchange in their first telephone call.
Russian envoy for human rights Tatyana Moskalkova held a rare meeting with her Ukrainian counterpart, Lyudmyla Denisova, in Kyiv on July 15 to discuss a swap involving the 24 Ukrainian sailors captured near the Kerch Strait last year, Russian news agencies reported.
Meanwhile, a court in Kyiv postponed a hearing that was expected to lead to the release of Russian journalist Kirill Vyshinskiy, who is in detention in Ukraine....
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Zelensky's spokeswoman on diplomatic changes afoot.
When Russia-Backed Forces Boasted They Shot Down A Ukrainian Military Plane…That Was Actually MH17
By Carl Schreck
The wreckage of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was still smoldering in the countryside of eastern Ukraine, the remains of the 298 people aboard strewn across several kilometers of rolling fields of wheat and sunflowers, when Russian media began relaying news of a downed plane in the area.
“A fresh victory for the Donetsk rebels: Another Ukrainian plane was shot down in the city of Torez,” the anchorwoman for the Kremlin-loyal network LifeNews told viewers, referring to Russia-backed separatists fighting Kyiv’s forces in the region known as the Donbas:
The shoot-down led the network’s news segment on the evening of July 17, 2014, as the anchorwoman gave details of the separatists’ putative triumph.
“The rebels say they were able to shoot down another transport plane of the Ukrainian Air Force,” she said. “This occurred above the city of Torez in the self-declared Donetsk Republic. It all happened at around 5 p.m. Moscow time. A Ukrainian An-26 was flying, and suddenly it was struck by a missile, an explosion was heard, and the plane began to fall.”
The plane, of course, was not a Ukrainian military aircraft. It was MH17, from whose fuselage thick black smoke was streaming into the summer sky in the amateur footage broadcast by LifeNews.
The segment is part of a patchwork of evidence -- including news reports, social-media posts, and witness accounts -- showing that the Russia-backed separatists initially believed they had shot down an enemy aircraft -- and even boasted about doing so -- before the scale of the tragedy became clear. The victims – adults and children on a routine Boeing 777 flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur -- included citizens of 17 countries.
An international criminal investigation has since concluded that MH17 was shot down by a surface-to-air Buk missile from Russia’s 53rd Antiaircraft Missile Brigade that was fired from territory held by the Russia-backed separatists. Last month, Dutch prosecutors announced murder charges against three Russian nationals and one Ukrainian for their alleged roles in the crime.
Both Russia and the separatist leadership deny involvement in the downing of MH17, despite the compelling evidence presented by Dutch prosecutors.
Here’s a look back at those brief few hours five years ago when the separatists -- in concert with Kremlin-friendly Russian media -- took credit for shooting down the plane that turned out to be MH17.