A member of Ukraine’s parliament said that Ukrainians want to think and read in Russian

Member of the Verkhovna Rada, Oleksandr Dubinsky, who is under arrest on charges of treason, said that bookstores in Ukraine are closing because they sell books only in Ukrainian, while local residents want to read and think in Russian.

He wrote this on his Telegram channel.

“There’s grief in the Ukrainian segment of Telegram. Bookstores are closing all over Ukraine because there are no buyers. People simply do not want to read books in the state language, no matter what. Bulgakov was banned, monuments were torn down, and still they do not want to. Strange, isn’t it?” he wrote.

Dubinsky also recalled situations in which Ukrainians in public places ask others not to speak Russian. However, in his view, the population wants to listen to music, read, and think in Russian.

In December 2025, Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada removed Russian from the list of languages protected by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The decision was adopted on the third attempt: the bill was first introduced in 2024 but withdrawn, and then removed from parliament’s agenda again in October 2025. The status of the Russian language in Ukraine remains one of the topics in negotiations on settling the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, while President Volodymyr Zelensky refuses to recognize it as a state language, calling such demands an “ultimatum.”