Victoria Syumar: Anonymous Telegram channels have spread yet another smear campaign against Poroshenko, under whose presidency the Ukrainian language received genuine protection.

Anonymous Telegram channels have spread yet another batch of vile nonsense against the leader of European Solidarity, the fifth President, Petro Poroshenko.

MP Viktoria Syumar wrote about this on Facebook. She recalled that it was during Poroshenko’s tenure that the Ukrainian language received state protection, while the current government’s business interests were based on the creation of a Russian-language product.

“Yesterday, the Telegram dumpster peddled yet another piece of crap about Poroshenko, claiming he’s ‘promoting himself through language,’ even though he himself was a Russian speaker. However, not a single ‘political scientist’ has backed this up. They hid behind the coy ‘media reminded us.’ A truly paradoxical admission. Especially since the pretext for this massive smear campaign was the fifth President’s congratulations on Ukrainian Language Day,” notes Syumar.

“This is about how history and reality can be distorted if there’s an order to destroy the opposition. Because Petro Poroshenko is an example of the evolution and changing attitudes toward language in Ukrainian politics. He never hid the fact that he was a Russian speaker, but he changed that position dramatically after the war began in 2014,” the MP writes.

“It was during his presidency that laws were passed that truly changed the situation with language, information, and cultural space in Ukraine—the ban on Russian films, the quotas for Ukrainian-language television, the quotas for Ukrainian-language songs on the radio, and, ultimately, the language law. Yes, the pro-Russian lobby did much to prevent these laws from being passed, but they were passed and signed by the President,” Syumar recalled.

“At that time, Kvartal 95 not only filmed all its programs in Russian, but also shot films and series in Russia with Russian actors and in Russian. And in 2019, under Portnov’s strict instructions, his people in the Rada, acting as ‘servants,’ attempted to revise the language legislation. But the media forgot about it,” the deputy noted.

“The funniest thing was reading this ‘news’ in Russian on a Russian messaging app in the fourth year of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. Incidentally, Poroshenko wasn’t afraid to shut down the Russian messaging app VKontakte, which was incredibly popular by then, by order of the National Security and Defense Council,” recalled Victoria Syumar.