On February 24, 2023, Yuri Shevchuk was interviewed live on Suspilne TV. Sprotyv, Ukraine (Public TV. Resistance). He discussed how the Russian war in Ukraine affects the language situation in Ukraine, and accelerates the tendency of more and more Ukrainian citizens to switch from Russian to Ukrainian in their everyday lives.

The previous day Shevchuk gave a presentation at the roundtable “Decolonizing Ukrainian Culture” held at the Ukrainian Museum in New York City. He discussed how the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation sought to assimilate Ukrainians linguistically by resorting to various forms of Russification, from direct prohibition on the public use of the Ukrainian language in education, book-publishing, science, religion, and other communicative spheres, to interference into the very system of the Ukrainian language in order to erase the phonetic, morphological, lexical, and syntactic properties that mark Ukrainian as original, inimitable language and turn it into a pale simulacrum of Russian.