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Volodymyr Kulyk

Women walk past a movie theater in central Kiev. Cinemas are the new testing ground in the debate over how to promote the Ukrainian language in the country of 46 million after centuries of dominance from Moscow.

Which is Ukraine’s native language, Ukrainian or Russian?

The World in Words

One of the many tensions in Ukraine has been over language. Ukrainian used to be considered the language of peasants, while Russian was the language of the educated. This story from our archives shows how the push-pull between Russia and Ukraine has been going on for many decades.