"Degenerates" and "stupid animals": anti-UOC activists turn on children

Anti-UOC activists insult children. Photo: Kyiv FM

We have grown accustomed to the Ukrainian media landscape being dominated by people who have made it their mission to hate anyone they dislike. Not to offer reasoned criticism, but to hate.

This time, activist M. Koval, who organizes “patriotic” protests outside courthouses during proceedings against the UOC, appeared on air alongside journalist B. Butkevych, who has been campaigning against the Church for more than 12 years. What followed was nearly an hour of relentless insults, slander, and undisguised venom. Epithets such as “scum,” “bastards,” and “FSB agents,” along with calls to ban the UOC outright, without any court proceedings – to hell with the whole thing.

But this time, even that was not the most shocking part. These two people, united in their hatred of the Church, are not content with insulting clergy and believers. They also consider it perfectly acceptable to abuse Ukrainian children simply for watching cartoons in Russian.

“How many birdbrained hens out there still can’t figure out what to put on for their little degenerate?” Butkevych says, making a point of stressing that he deliberately calls children “degenerates.”

“You walk past a playground, and there it is, speaking Russian. Why are you doing that? Don’t you have any other cartoons? Humanity has come up with this wonderful invention called subtitles. So turn them on, you stupid animal,” he continues.

Koval, meanwhile, complains that despite all the efforts to impose the Ukrainian language, her own children ask her to read them fairy tales in Russian so they can learn the language. Apparently, their classmates at a Kyiv school cannot understand them.

And here is the interesting part: neither participant seems particularly comfortable speaking Ukrainian. Throughout the interview, Koval repeatedly found herself on the verge of slipping Russian words into her speech, catching herself at the last moment. Butkevych, for his part, regularly switched outright to the language of the occupier.

Yet somehow, it is the children who are the “degenerates” and “stupid animals.”

On a more serious note, future historians studying our time will one day shake their heads in disbelief and ask themselves: How could the information agenda of an entire country have been shaped for so long by people so petty, vicious, and utterly contemptible?

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