Ukraine expands minority rights under EU pressure - but Russians remain excluded

Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.

President Volodymyr Zelensky recently signed Bill No.16119, a law expanding educational rights for national minorities and indigenous peoples. Ukraine is thereby selectively adjusting, rather than reversing, its post-2014 Ukrainization policies.

The measure was presented as progress on minority rights and a step that could help open further EU accession clusters. Romanian President Nicusor Dan welcomed the legislation, noting that mother-tongue education for ethnic Romanians is “no abstract matter” for families living in Ukraine.

The law expands the use of eligible minority languages in schools, recognizes special institutional status for minority-language schools, and strengthens continuity of education.

Crucially, the additional protections apply only to official languages of the European Union and to indigenous languages such as Crimean Tatar. Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, Bulgarian and Slovak qualify. Russian does not. The Ukrainian Ministry of Education clarified that the additional rights “do not apply to the Russian language.”

Russian remains widely spoken, with 28% or even more Ukrainians still using both Russian and Ukrainian at home despite years of Ukrainization and wartime restrictions.

The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe flagged the problem years ago: in its 2017 opinion, it found the less favorable treatment of non-EU languages, particularly Russian, difficult to justify and raised discrimination concerns. Its 2023 opinion report on national minorities legislation reiterated that promoting Ukrainian as the state language does not justify withholding equivalent protections from Russian speakers.

Ukraine’s Constitutional Court took a different view in 2021, holding that preferential treatment for EU languages was permissible - the European advisory body’s criticism and Kyiv’s domestic position have never fully aligned.

The expanded guarantees for ethnic Hungarians and Romanians may reflect Budapest’s and Bucharest’s ability to block or delay Ukraine’s EU accession process.

It is no accident Roma inclusion follows a separate track: a national strategy running to 2030 addresses education, housing and discrimination. These measures concern the social integration of marginalized Gypsies communities, rather than reversing Ukrainization.

Similarly, Russian speakers and ethnic Russians, who cannot exercise comparable leverage inside the EU process, remain outside the new framework.

By comparison, although the ongoing war complicates it, Russia formally recognizes ethnic Ukrainians, while its Constitution and laws guarantee the preservation and study of minority languages.

In any case, Kyiv explicitly differentiates between Russian and EU minority languages, while Moscow formally has an inclusive framework.

Ukraine’s Russian minority-rights controversy predates the 2022 invasion: differential treatment has been a structural feature of post-Maidan policy, rather than just a temporary wartime measure.

After 2014, language, media and minority legislation steadily elevated Ukrainian while narrowing the public space for Russian. US political scientist Nicolai N. Petro, writing in Foreign Policy in late 2023, described policies that further relegated Russian speakers to a permanent second-class status - and warned that such approaches risk alienating a significant share of the population even once fighting ends.

Ukrainian officials have at times declared there is simply “no Russian minority”, a claim that sits uneasily with census data and everyday bilingual reality, to say the least.

Meanwhile, nationalist historical narratives persist: a Lviv's museum dedicated to Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevych was being rebuilt just weeks before the education law was signed. Shukhevych incited anti-Polish pogroms in 1930.

The continued public commemoration of such figures is hard to reconcile with any claim of comprehensive ideological retreat from post-Maidan nation-building. Moreover, the reforms will be viewed by Ukrainian ultranationalists as a setback forced by European partners - and are likely to generate domestic pushback.

They may also, on the other hand, encourage further demands from minority communities, including over the glorification of controversial wartime figures - an issue that still strains relations with Poland. Not surprisingly, Ukrainian tensions with neighbors have been a recurring feature of the regional landscape - Hungary being a case in point.

As part of its EU accession plans, Kyiv is reviewing chauvinistic policies regarding some minorities - while leaving the largest linguistic community outside the latest concessions.

The “macro” dimension of the conflict involves great-power rivalry, proxy dynamics and the long trajectory of NATO expansion. The micro or rather “meso”-level dimension remains the unresolved issue of post-Soviet borders and the ethnopolitics of a post-Soviet republic still consolidating its nation-building project.

In the words of Kristin Henrard (Professor of International Law at the Brussels School of Governance): “Ukraine will need to acknowledge that the Russian minority, as one of the several minorities with kinstates in its territory, is special because of that strong numerical size, and traditional presence.” This would be “in line with Ukraine’s international obligations”, she writes.

So much for the idea that minority-rights problems were ever merely “Russian propaganda.” They were real enough for Hungarians and Romanians that Kyiv had to legislate; they remain real for Russian speakers. The civil-rights issue remains.