Reported by
Years before Russian forces crossed into Ukraine under the guise of protecting Russian speakers, Moscow was quietly bankrolling a covert legislative campaign to deepen its cultural and political foothold in the country, according to an investigation by Schemes, a project of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian service.
Documents reporters obtained say that a Russian state foundation financed and directly guided the promotion of Ukraine’s highly controversial 2012 language law.
The legislation, widely known as the “Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law,” was long condemned by critics as a Trojan horse designed to accelerate the russification of Ukraine. Neither Vadym Kolesnichenko nor Serhiy Kivalov responded to journalists’ requests for comment.
The newly obtained records provide a rare, documented glimpse into Moscow's soft-power subversion. Months before the law was passed, Vadym Kolesnichenko, a then-Ukrainian lawmaker and co-author of the bill, petitioned Russia’s Pravfond - a state-owned foundation - for nearly two million rubles ($61,150). The funds were earmarked to prepare, print, and distribute an alternative report accusing Ukraine of violating the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
According to the documents, Pravfond approved 1.25 million rubles ($38,600) for the project, officially presenting it as a defense of Russian-language rights in Ukraine.
But the correspondence between a member of parliament in Kyiv and a director of a state fund in Moscow reveals a relationship that went well beyond financial sponsorship.
Igor Panevkin, the head of Pravfond at the time, provided Kolesnichenko with explicit tactical instructions on how to shape the report. In one exchange, Panevkin advised that the English-language version that was to be sent to Council of Europe monitors should be deliberately altered from the original text in Russian, ensuring its claims would be harder for Ukrainian authorities to successfully rebut.
In another letter, Kolesnichenko candidly described the report’s true objective: applying political pressure on the Ukrainian government.
The final report was ultimately published as a book, complete with an acknowledgment thanking Pravfond for its backing. Its foreword was penned by Serhiy Kivalov, Kolesnichenko’s then fellow Party of Regions lawmaker and the law's co-author.
Their efforts did not go unnoticed in the Kremlin. Seven months after the language law was adopted, Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded both men state honors for “popularizing the Russian language abroad” during a televised award ceremony in Moscow.
The cross-border coordination extended well after the law's passage. In 2013, Kolesnichenko sought an additional two million rubles ($66,000) from Pravfond to finance a brochure detailing how citizens could leverage the new law in courts, educational institutions, and official state paperwork to broaden the use of Russian.
Schemes reporters found that the brochure's co-authors, academics Mykhailo Tovt and Stepan Chernychko, each received 5,000 Ukrainian hryvnias ($600) for their contributions to the guide, which actively encouraged the widespread use of Russian in public services and parliamentary proceedings. Tovt and Chernychko told Schemes that they have no recollection of whether they received the funds or not. They both refused allegations, saying their work on the guide was purely professional.
Ukraine’s Constitutional Court ultimately struck down the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law in 2018, ruling it unconstitutional. Yet, the legislation's deep roots have proven difficult to entirely eradicate. According to Schemes, references to the defunct law have continued to surface in later Ukrainian court decisions, a lingering testament to how far Moscow's influence originally spread.
