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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
The Commissioner for the Protection of the State Language, Olena Ivanovska, launched an inquiry into the Russian-language communication of SBU and HUR fighters during the Kyiv shootout after a complaint she received on 2 September. The author of the complaint turned out to be the controversial Kyiv dog hunter Oleksiy Sviatohor. In his appeal he called the fighters' speech “the hostile Russian language” and even suggested the version that it was for this reason that the shooting between the security forces began.
This was reported to “Ukrainian News” in response to a request by the head of the ombudsperson’s secretariat, Yurii Zubko. Earlier, Informator reported the very fact of the inquiry launched by language ombudsperson Olena Ivanovska. It is now known that the impetus for the appeal was Sviatohor’s complaint, who presents himself as the editor-in-chief of the nationwide bulletin “Hovory!”.
“It is troubling that during the ‘clash’ between representatives of Ukraine’s elite special units, communication took place in the hostile Russian language... I consider such a form of communication a violation of language legislation, since special units... are obliged to use exclusively the state language, and in no way the language of the enemy,” Oleksiy Sviatohor wrote in his appeal to the ombudsperson.
The author of the complaint went further and proposed a version about the causes of the shooting itself. According to him, the security officers allegedly opened fire on one another precisely because they heard Russian and took each other for an enemy sabotage group.
“The mutual shooting occurred precisely because the communication was in Russian, where representatives of one special service heard Russian-language expressions from the other side and identified the representatives of the other side as the enemy,” Sviatohor noted in his appeal.
In addition to the official complaint, the dog hunter devoted a separate Facebook post to the topic, where he claimed that he allegedly plans, together with the ombudsperson, to “put the lazy HUR and SBU employees in their place” for neglecting the state language.
Explanations demanded from HUR and SBU
The Commissioner for the Protection of the State Language is demanding that HUR and SBU provide identifying data of the employees involved in the incident and explain why they were communicating in a non-state language while performing official duties. After reviewing the information received from the agencies, the ombudsperson will decide on further response measures provided by law.
The shooting between the SBU and HUR itself took place on the night of 2 September on Shumskoho Street in Kyiv and caused a loud public outcry. It was the videos published online from the incident, in which Russian-language phrases of the officers can be heard, that became the basis for the language inquiry.
Earlier Informator reported that the president dismissed a senior SBU official after the shootout between the special services in Kyiv. We also wrote that HUR tried to detain Kaplunov because he began to give testimony about the circumstances of the shootout, according to a source.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Перестрілка між ГУР та СБУ – на бійців поскаржився мовному омбудсмену скандальний догхантер". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Informator.
