Then there is the special category of Cyrillic letters reserved only for the Ukrainian language. (The English word “alarm” behaves similarly, being both the mechanism that produces the sound, and the feeling it engenders.) Through all of this, it was impossible to forget that, though I wasn’t learning Ukrainian to make any kind of political point, the Ukrainian language itself was deeply concerned with the war. Since the Maidan protests of 2013-14, and especially since 2022, embracing the Ukrainian language has, for many, been an active, personal act of decolonisation. View image in fullscreen Breaktime at a Ukrainian language evening class in Kharkiv, April 2023.