Kyiv has stripped the Russian language of its protection under Europe’s Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Culture warriors at home and abroad have hailed this as a victory; in truth, the move strikes out at millions of Russophone Ukrainians, divides the country and confirms some of Putin’s claims about Ukraine. In a war of survival, splitting Ukraine and feeding Putin’s propaganda is not a cultural sideshow. It is suicide.

With his slight frame and warm, modest face, Pavel Viktor looks more like a parish priest than a political firebrand. In reality he is a physics teacher in Odessa, known to millions of Ukrainian schoolchildren for his experimental YouTube lessons. He remains in Odessa under bombardment and at 71 is still teaching. He is a model patriot by any measure. Yet he was recently pilloried for saying what most Ukrainians find obvious: to demand of children hiding in bomb shelters that they don’t speak their native Russian is inhumane. Nationalist outlets seized on the remark as disloyal. Viewers across Ukraine sided with Viktor.

The row captures the current standoff between a noisy clique, whom Kyiv now backs, and the broad majority of Ukrainians, who see these crusades as dangerously divisive. Viktor’s remark became a scandal only because language in Ukraine is now treated like a controlled substance. In schools and universities, Russian, spoken by millions in the country, has been banished from classrooms.

‘State........

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