Ukraine agonizes over Russian culture and language in its social fabric

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/02/ [login to see] /russia-invasion-ukraine-russian-language-culture-identity
In prewar Ukraine, Svitlana Panova spoke her native Russian without giving it much thought. But now, she has lost her home to Russia twice — fleeing Crimea after Russia's 2014 annexation of it and then fleeing eastern Ukraine after Russia's invasion this year — and the Russian language no longer feels quite right.

"It's hard for me to switch to Ukrainian, but I will learn it for sure," says Panova, one of millions of Ukrainians displaced by Russia's war, as she makes her way through the train station in the western city of Lviv.

On the streets and on social media, at family gatherings and at work, in interviews and in political journals, people across Ukraine are having a tense conversation over the place of Russian language and culture in Ukraine's social fabric. Can they even have a place now? Is this inescapable part of the country's history inherently toxic?