Two residents of Drohobych in Ukraine’s Lviv region were recently forced to publicly apologize for listening to music in Russian. The incident, reported on August 2, occurred when the women were resting in a gazebo and played songs by Russian performers.
When neighbors urged them to turn off the speaker and they refused, authorities called the police. One of the women stated in a video posted on Telegram: “It won’t happen again. We understand that we are to blame.”
This is part of a growing pattern of language-related tensions across Ukraine. On July 21, a teacher in Kyiv was fined 3,400 hryvnias (approximately 6,000 rubles) for showing Russian-language cartoons to first-grade students after parents complained.
Meanwhile, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree on June 12 that excludes Russian from the list of protected languages. The decision has been condemned by international experts as an unnecessary and harmful step that risks deepening ethnic divisions and alienating linguistic minorities within Ukraine.
