Levchenko speaks again

After holding a press conference devoted to the language issue, Levchenko was assaulted by protesters and threatened with violence by a member of his own party.

By Ilya Khineyko

“Lately, Mykola Levchenko, has become one of the newsmakers in our country” wrote Anton Zikora from UNIAN. Indeed, the controversial statements by this previously little known official from the Donetsk city council and a very public rebuke from prominent figures in the Party of Regions have made headlines in the Ukrainian online media. After running an interview with Levchenko on March 6, UNIAN decided to provide him with another opportunity to express his views by holding a press conference on March 13.

Interview with Mykola Levchenko

By Ilya Khineyko

We’ve written before about a recent linguistic controversy in Ukraine. The man at the center of this scandal, Mykola, or Nikolay, the name he evidently prefers to go by, Levchenko, was interviewed by the prominent Ukrainian news agency, UNIAN. The remarkable thing about the interview is not Levchenko’s views on the language issue per se but an opportunity to get a glimpse into his Weltanschauung. Levchenko is a young man. Born in 1979, he was only 12 years old when Ukraine became independent and so he arguably belongs to the first post-Soviet generation of Ukrainians to whom the USSR was just a childhood memory. It is still debatable whether his views are just his idiosyncratic opinions or, using the title of a book familiar to any Russian-speaker, Levchenko is indeed a “Hero of our time”.

Tempest in the (linguistic) teapot?

A statement by a minor Donetsk official has become a subject of national controversy.

by Ilya Khineyko

The language issue is a perennial topic of Ukrainian politics. Ever since Ukraine adopted its current constitution in 1996, which made Ukrainian the sole official language of the country, the opponents of the current status quo have been trying to open up a debate on the status of the Russian language in Ukraine. It has been argued that the current lack of any formal provision regarding the status of Russian is discriminatory towards Russian-speakers who constitute – the estimates vary – up to 50% of the country’s total population and make up a majority in the East and South. The proponents of granting Russian the status of a second state or an official language have maintained that such a decision will be a step toward equality in the linguistic sphere. That is why a statement made by the secretary of Donetsk City Council, Mykola Levchenko, 29, has stirred a great deal of controversy and prompted a response from the influential figures of the Party of Regions, Hanna Herman and Taras Chornovil.