The country's education ombudsman has urged teachers to use only Ukrainian with students

Ukraine's education ombudsman has advised schoolteachers to act as if they only understand Ukrainian when speaking with students. Kiev mandates the use of Ukrainian in most aspects of public life, despite a significant portion of the population speaking Russian as their native tongue.

In an interview on Monday, Nadezhda Lishchik said her office had received complaints from school administrators about students who refused to speak Ukrainian during breaks. While teachers are required to speak Ukrainian at all times, students are allowed to use any language outside of the classroom.

"My advice was: 'You are not obliged to know a foreign language, unless you teach one, like English or German. You have full right to say you don't understand and insist on being addressed in the same language you use during classes.' You can influence students in a gentle way," Lishchik said.

The Ukrainization of public life has been a major policy focus for the government since the Western-backed armed coup in Kiev in 2014. Ukrainian law mandates the use of the state language in media, commerce and education. There are limited exemptions for some ethnic minorities, including Hungarians and Crimean Tatars, but not for the largest minority group, ethnic Russians.

Despite the measures, research indicates that Russian remains widely used. A 2024 online content analysis reported by the Ukrainskaya Pravda newspaper found that while nearly 80% of Ukrainian posts on Facebook last year were in the state language, only 47% of TikTok clips were - a drop from 55% in 2023. Facebook's user base in Ukraine tends to be older, while TikTok is more popular with younger people.

Kiev's difficulty encouraging children to use Ukrainian was also acknowledged last year by then-language ombudsman Taras Kremen, who lamented that just 39% of schoolchildren spoke Ukrainian at home, with even fewer using it among friends.

Russian officials have accused Kiev of discriminating against ethnic Russians as part of what they call radical nationalist policies. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has described the Ukrainization campaign as a "legislative extermination" of Russian culture.