Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
⁉️ A whip for the people, a shield for the powerful: is the language ombudsman covering for officials caught on NABU tapes?
I preliminarily sent an official request for public information to the Commissioner for the Protection of the State Language. The purpose of this document was clear and understandable to every Ukrainian: to find out whether the Ombudsman’s Secretariat takes any real response measures, issues administrative reports, or imposes fines on high-ranking officials whose Russian-language conversations while performing state functions were officially recorded and published by NABU in the high-profile operations “Forrest Gump,” “Themis,” and “Midas.”
We were talking about working meetings, official negotiations, and decisions over the fate of state assets involving former Deputy Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Iryna Mudra, former heads of the Presidential Office, government officials, and heads of state giants such as Energoatom and SENS BANK.
And then an official reply arrived signed by the head of the Secretariat, Yurii Zubko. The response is phrased in the classic format of bureaucratic brush-off, and to call things by their name — in the format of a conscious defense of the right of corrupt officials to freely speak Russian in state positions.
The Commissioner and his staff assure that they have not received any complaints or reports about top officials from the NABU tapes, and that they do not keep separate records for specific officials. All of this is generously masked and concealed by provisions on “personal data protection” and access restrictions. In other words, an entire agency funded by taxpayers simply refuses to acknowledge documented facts when the highest-ranking officials disdain the state language while performing their direct duties.
❗️ And this silent blindness looks particularly disgusting against the background of how ruthlessly and principledly the same state machine hunts ordinary Ukrainians. When mothers need to be fined for remarks in school parent chats — the Ombudsman’s Secretariat sees everything. When passengers in a minibus in the half-ruined and daily shelled Kherson must be held accountable — the system works. They even hold a mother accountable and issue a fine because her underage child posted a TikTok video with Russian-language audio.
For ordinary citizens they instantly find both Administrative Offences Code articles and fines from 3 400 to 11 900 hryvnias, and repressive explanatory leaflets…
A perfectly logical question arises: what the hell is this? This is pure, distilled cynicism and the absurdity of a warped system. Punitive methods and financial demands are applied exclusively against ordinary people, while regarding top officials, top corrupt figures and various “Mindich-Chernyshov-Mudri” — the state machine immediately switches to total blindness and legal advocacy mode.
📌 No, this is not protection of the language — this is a complete degradation of the system of public administration, where the law has turned into a whip for the vulnerable and a reliable shield for the powerful!