Inside the Race to Protect Ukrainian

Foreign Policy reports on the effort underway to protect the Ukrainian language amid Russia's invasion -- a race playing out alongside the physical war, as occupation authorities work to suppress Ukrainian in schools, media, and public life across territory Moscow controls, while linguists, archivists, and diaspora communities scramble to document and preserve it. This is not a new playbook. Cultural erasure has been a companion to territorial conquest for as long as empires have existed -- Russification campaigns under the Tsars and the USSR followed the same logic: control the language, and you control the next generation's sense of what nation they belong to.