Cath. R.

Russian-speaking [Ukrainians] are a disease that must be eradicated,” says children’s writer (!) Larysa Nitsoi in the media. And apparently no one sees a problem. No one stops her. No one holds her criminally accountable for hate speech, for inciting hostility, or for rhetoric that can be read as a call for violence against the “wrong kind” of Ukrainians. This is what contemporary fascistic Ukraine looks like: a country where millions of its own citizens can be branded by representatives of the post-Maidan intelligentsia as a “disease” to be “treated” or “eradicated” because they speak the "wrong" language. When human beings are described as a contagion, when an entire linguistic community is pathologized and presented as something the national body must be cleansed of, we are no longer talking about an innocent “language debate.” This is the vocabulary of dehumanization. It is the logic of eugenics. It is the rhetoric historically associated with fascism and Nazism. And all of this is unfolding in a state politically, financially, and militarily backed by the West.