"You need to know your enemy." Ukrainian professor gives reasons why Russian remains popular at Harvard

Russian is still taught at Harvard because students want to know what is happening in a country that is at war with Ukraine. In addition, political issues were related to Russia, particularly during the Cold War, so students were interested in who they were dealing with.

Natalia Shpyliova-Sayid, a professor of Ukrainian at Harvard University's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, spoke about this in an interview with Voice of America. She noted that immediately after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there was a slight decrease in the number of students studying Russian. In particular, because students joined Ukrainian language courses to express their support.

"At the moment, Russian studies are not experiencing any critical situation or a decline in interest in studying Russia. On the contrary, the attitude is that you need to know the enemy and that you need to understand what is happening there. There are also narratives being promoted that there are allegedly many trends in Russia that show that people are opposing the government and therefore we need to pay attention to these moments and study them," the lecturer says.

As a reminder, there is still a Russian-language school in Ukraine. The educational institution, which has 44 children in 4 grades, is located in the Dnipro region. In addition, one of the schools in the Kharkiv region provides bilingual education. Thus, 403 children study in Russian at the school. Russian is taught as a separate subject in 3 schools. It was chosen as an independent discipline by 768 students, and another 79 children study it in clubs.

Only verified information is available on the OBOZ.UA Telegram channel and Viber. Do not fall for fakes!