CREECA Lecture Series

At the legislative level, Ukraine is rife with ambiguities over the status of the Russian language and whether Russians are a valid ethnic minority in need of protection. In western regions of the country, however, the primacy of the Ukrainian language is taken as a given. Peacock shows that notions of speaking Ukrainian are central to claims of authentic Ukrainian identity, but a number of factors highlight the ambiguities underlying this often cited “fact” of western Ukrainian identity.