LitHub – Poetry by Kateryna Kalytko – “In one very real sense, the current war in Ukraine is about language. Vladimir Putin has presented the defense of Russian-speakers in Ukraine as justification for a campaign of cultural and political domination. In an article posted to the Kremlin website last July, he went so far as to compare the institutionalizing of Ukrainian language and culture to “weapons of mass destruction.” Extending the metaphor, he continues: “Such a crude, artificial dichotomy between Russians and Ukrainians may have caused the total Russian population to decrease by hundreds of thousands, or even millions.” This accusation is no less chilling for its absurdity: Ukraine, the argument goes, has robbed Russia of ethnic Russians by compelling them to speak Ukrainian. This cultural shift from Russian towards Ukrainian is what Putin seems to mean when he evokes the term genocide, as a perverse pretext for the mass killing of Ukrainian civilians. The poet Kateryna Kalytko, rather than denying the violent power of words, embraces it. “Here, take this language, woman,” she writes in a 2019 poem. “Use it to shoot.” Nothing has united the Ukrainian people around a single language like Russia’s attack on its sovereignty. In a paper published in 2017, the political scientist Volodymyr Kulyk found that following the 2014 annexation of Crimea and outbreak of the Donbas war, more people throughout Ukraine “want the state to help the Ukrainian language to be more widely used, in accordance with both its legal status and symbolic role as the national language.” This past January 2022, as Russian troops prepared to invade, Ukraine passed a language law, requiring that Ukrainian be used in official contexts, including schools…”