Ukraine speaker against referendum on Russian-language status
16:55 | 22/ 03/ 2006
KIEV, March 22 (RIA Novosti, Pavel Dulman) - The speaker of the
Ukrainian parliament said Wednesday that he was against the idea of
holding a referendum on the status of the Russian language in the
country.
"Referendums are not held in an unstable country with unstable
society," Volodymyr Lytvyn said during a meeting with potential voters
in the run-up to the March 26 parliamentary elections.
He said Russian, which is widely spoken in many regions, should not
become an official language as it would replace Ukrainian. "This is
impossible in a country called Ukraine," said the speaker, who is
considered by some to be pro-Russian.
With the parliamentary polls approaching, the status of Russian has
become something of a battleground, but Lytvyn, who heads his own
eponymous bloc, said people who could speak no language perfectly were
raising the issue of two languages.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said earlier that he did not
welcome the decision by the authorities of Ukraine's second largest
city, Kharkov, to make Russian a regional language.
"This campaign does not correspond with Ukrainian interests," he said.
The city authorities in Kharkov, which is in the Russian-speaking
stronghold of eastern Ukraine, decided to grant the Russian language
the status of a regional language referring to the Ukrainian
parliament's ratification of the European Charter of Regional
Languages.
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