Eternal Playbooks About Impoverishment: How Former Regionals Keep Seeding Social Media in the Aggressor’s Language

In the fifth year of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, you might expect politicians, let alone members of parliament, to conduct public communication in the state language. Unfortunately, those expectations have proven futile.

Some Ukrainian MPs, such as Oleksandr Feldman, spend hundreds of thousands of hryvnias promoting posts in Russian. Yurii Boyko, from the page of his public organization “Mir. Rozvytok. Stalnist” (Peace. Development. Stability), also talks in Russian about the impoverishment of Ukrainians and the “bespredel of TCK.” These findings are shown by research from CHESNO.

At the same time, some politicians, for example Oleksii Honcharenko, have finally switched to Ukrainian in their blogs over the past year. The CHESNO movement investigated why the Russian language is still present in Ukrainian politics and whether legislation regulates this.

The law is not an order to pro-Russian MPs

Ukrainian legislation clearly defines that advertising on the territory of the country must be distributed in the state language. This is regulated by two provisions at once — article 32 of the law “On Ensuring the Functioning of the Ukrainian Language as the State Language” and article 6 of the law “On Advertising.” However, the established rules do not seem to be a sufficient argument for seasoned Ukrainian lawmakers.

A striking example is Yurii Boyko, the former head of the banned party OPZZh and now the head of the parliamentary group “Platform for Life and Peace.” The page of his public organization “Mir. Rozvytok. Stalnist” repeatedly ran targeted ads with his video addresses on Meta platforms.

Boyko states in his declarations that he is a member of this public organization. Earlier, the CHESNO movement wrote that the largest expenditures of the NGO “Mir. Rozvytok. Stalnist” are “financial assistance to low-income population groups from deputy R. S. Akhmetov.”

Screenshot of the “Mir. Rozvytok. Stalnist” ad on the Meta Ad Library platform

The ads themselves are always published in Russian, and in the video Boyko talks about the impoverishment of Ukrainians, the price of bread, and the “bespredel of TCK.” He also constantly mentions the need for peace.

This is hardly surprising when recalling Boyko’s political career. He first became a deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of the VI convocation on the Party of Regions’ lists; later Boyko was a minister in the government of regionalist Mykola Azarov.