Don’t worry, there are some in Ukraine as well.
My favourite one is currently “Oleksander Leonenko”. He seems like a very patriotic guy from Odessa, self-identifies as a “language inspector”, his T-shirt print roughly translates to the following: “talk to me in UKRAINIAN, I live in Ukraine and I DON’T UNDERSTAND Russian”, etc.
He is bravely defending Ukraine against the invasion of orcs right now!
Ah, wait no, sorry my bad, actually he was detained by conscription officers on 13th (his boyfriend used some extremely weird words when describing the situation - “police illegally kidnapped a person”… Sounds like Russian propaganda if you ask me, this literally never happens in Ukraine, why do Ukrainian sources even share this obvious misinformation…), and on 19th he started asking for donations attempting to raise 500k uah = 12k usd in order to “save his life”. Not sure what are those money for, but definitely not for a bribe.
Doubt he’s “from” Odesa. The country side around Odesa spawns Ukrainian Nationalists like crazy.
The language wars have been the funniest shit to me since I was a kid in Odesa. Especially with what happened now, half the country goes on Duo Lingo overnight. Having grown up with this stupid shit, it was really funny to immigrate to the US and learn about like the slave trade and Jim Crow, and be like “damn Ukrainians really do love to complain”.
Which is heavily ironic because my dad immediately went the other way and just became mildly racist about how “black people be demanding things”. Shit’s hilarious because it was always like “in 1876 we were forced to cut out our tongues with the Ems decree, and we couldn’t celebrate the Taras Sevchenko centennial, and the evil Soviets made Russian the academic lingua franca”. But the people who literally couldn’t vote until 1964 and couldn’t live in certain neighborhoods (even to this day) are entitled.
It’s such a silly fucking position because of it’s wishy washy historicity once you start to “collect evidence” and ultimately it’s like if all complaints of oppression in America by black people were summed up with “they wouldn’t let us talk jive”.
It’s also really funny because if Ukraine fulfills it’s wildest EU/NATO/US FREEDOM dreams, in 10 years there will be less Russian and Ukranian than there is now. It will be like Iceland or Ireland where it’s fully colonized by capitalist English due to the economic realities, and there will be a large language divide between the younger and older generations in the country. Ukrainians only cling tightly to their traditions for their traditional enemies. They’ll gleefully shed all that for Westernization because it’s “the way of the world”. Sure they’ll be the classic holdouts of Galicia, but practically the country will erase its own language and culture much like Iceland and other countries suffering from success under neocolonialism.
