Kremlin has banned Ukrainian from occupied territory schools but elsewhere language is on the rise
Stuck at his home in Kyiv, Mykhailo Revenko listened to the sound of loud explosions. It was March 2022. Russian troops were on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital, their tanks on the move. The fate of his country hung in the balance.
“There was a curfew. My job had stopped. I suddenly had a lot of time. I didn’t want to watch movies so I pulled a book from the shelf,” Revenko said. A native Russian speaker, he decided to improve his Ukrainian. “I went to a Ukrainian school and knew the language. But I needed to work on my vocabulary,” he recalled.