There’s a lot to object to in Trump envoy Steve Witkoff’s interview with Tucker Carlson, but for now I’m going to stick to just a few glaring factual errors on the part of Witkoff.
About an hour into the interview, Witkoff tells Carlson, “I think the largest issue in that conflict are these so-called four regions, Donbass, Crimea, . . . [long pause] You know, the names, Lugansk, and there’s two others. They’re Russian-speaking, there have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule.”
First, it would be preferable if the American who is handling negotiations with Russia over Ukraine could remember the names of the four oblasts (provinces or states) that were annexed by Russia in this invasion — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — and that held faked referendums in September 2022. Crimea was occupied in February 2014, and held its own Russian-run, unfair, unfree, and rigged referendum in March 2014.
Second, there is no disputing that the referendums in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia were absolute shams, held five months after the invasion began, while Russian military forces were occupying those oblasts, run by government officials who had been appointed by the Russian occupying forces. According to the United Nations, in addition to opening polling places overseen by Russian-appointed officials and Russian security, “pro-Russian authorities accompanied by soldiers, also went door-to-door with ballot boxes.” Quite literally, Russian guys with guns show up at your door and ask you whether you want to vote the way they want or not! United Nations Secretary-General Antonio called the entire farce a “violation of the U.N. Charter and international law.”
The U.N.’s Undersecretary General Rosemary DiCarlo declared the “so-called referenda” (her term) were illegitimate because they were held “during active armed conflict, in areas under Russian control and outside Ukraine’s legal and constitutional framework. They cannot be called a genuine expression of the popular will.”
No one in their right mind would ever call those referendum legitimate. Naturally, Witkoff did; it is appalling to see a U.S. government official giving those shams the good housekeeping seal of approval.
But I want to take a moment to examine Witkoff’s description of those oblasts as “Russian speaking.” You’ll often see Putin apologists describing these regions as “Russian speaking,” to imply that culturally and historically, they are more Russian than Ukrainian and thus ought to be part of Russia.
Starting in the 1930s, all Soviet state government required everyone to speak Russian and did whatever it could to stamp out the use of the Ukrainian or any other native languages.
Stalin’s rule in the 1930s drastically shifted language policy from Ukrainization to Russification. Stalin did this to strengthen the Soviet Union, viewing multiple national cultures or languages across the USSR as detracting from Soviet Unity. Russification, in the context of the Soviet Union, referred to the state’s push for all member countries to speak Russian in day-to-day life, use Russian for government administration, and shed their cultural traditions and practices to focus solely on being Soviet member states. As the largest state in the USSR which was not ethnically Russian, Ukraine experienced an intense Russification effort from Soviet leadership, which had an incredible impact on Ukrainian literary tradition, and the Ukrainian language itself.
The Soviet Union even banned the Ukrainian letter “g” because it had no exact corresponding letter in Russian. And everyone in Ukraine from the 1930s to 1991 needed to speak Russian as their primary language, at minimum to interact with the government. Volodymyr Zelenskyy grew up speaking Russian, not Ukrainian.
Thus, almost everyone in Ukraine except those who learned to speak after early 90s qualifies as “Russian speaking,” and even today, it’s very rare to run into a Ukrainian who doesn’t understand Russian at all. That doesn’t mean they identify as Russian, want to speak Russian, or want to be ruled by the Russian state.
Last year, a survey of Ukrainians outside of Russian-occupied territories found that 12 percent of Ukrainians said they speak only Russian while 59 percent said they speak only Ukrainian. Russia is the language of the invader, so unsurprisingly, it’s a lot less popular these days.
(A lot of Westerners assume Russian and Ukrainian are similar or about the same, but that’s not really the case. While they both use the Cyrillic alphabet, they have different letters, the pronunciation of many words is different, and about 40 percent of the vocabulary is different. It’s also worth noting that particularly before the war, “some Ukrainians may not speak Russian, they have a large amount of exposure to Russian media, which facilitates their understanding of the Russian language. A Russian speaker, on the other hand, would have a difficult time understanding Ukrainian without prior exposure.”)
Does the Trump administration really want to sign on to the argument that if a population within a territory speaks a language of another country, it really ought to be part of that other country?
In 47 counties within Texas and New Mexico, “Spanish-language natives are at least 50 percent of the population — including Webb County (Laredo) at close to 95 percent, Hidalgo County (McAllen) at almost 88 percent and El Paso County at 78 percent.”
In Santa Cruz County, Arizona, 80 percent of residents speak Spanish in the home, and that figure is at 71 percent in Imperial County, California; 51 percent in Costilla County, Colorado; 63 percent in Miami-Dade County, Florida. And in places like the Bronx, New York (46 percent), and Seward County, Kansas (48.5 percent), even if it’s below 50 percent, more residents speak Spanish in the home than English. (All statistics courtesy the Modern Language Center.)
No one in their right mind would argue that those counties are not part of the United States and really belong to Mexico, or Spain, or any other Spanish-speaking country. No one would argue that Madawaska, Maine, ought to be French or part of Quebec because a majority of its residents speak French at home.
But Witkoff thinks it’s a big deal and worth emphasizing that these four oblasts are “Russian-speaking.”
Carlson writes, “Steve Witkoff has no background in diplomacy but has turned out to be the most effective American diplomat in a generation.”