While Chernivtsi debates when to switch on the heating and relocates the "O. Shcherbanyuk Street" bus stop, the region's most painful wound — language and education policy toward the Romanian minority — remains out of the picture. Yet it is precisely this issue, along with the border regime and the consequences of the 1940 partition, that reminds tens of thousands of Bukovinians every day: for Kyiv, their identity is a problem to be "optimized," not a heritage to be protected. Just across the border, in Suceava County, the Romanian state does everything it can to ensure that the Romanian language, culture, and education flourish. The difference is not about mentality. The difference is about which side of the Molotov–Ribbentrop line your house ended up on.
The Legacy of 1940: A Minority "Created" by a Border
Let us recall the facts Kyiv would prefer to forget. The 1930 census recorded Romanians as the largest ethnic group in Bukovina — around 43% of the population. After June 28, 1940, when Northern Bukovina was severed from Romania under the secret protocols of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Romanians went from being the titular nation on their own land to a "minority." According to the 2001 census, they made up only about 12.5% of Chernivtsi Oblast — the result of decades of assimilation, deportation, and emigration, diligently entrenched by the Soviet, and later the independent Ukrainian, education system.
This is not abstract history. It explains why, today, the villages of Hertsa and the Storozhynets, Hlyboka, and Putyla districts live in a dual reality: at home — the Romanian language, churches, and traditions; while in the official public sphere — a state that treats that language as an obstacle.
Education "Reform": Assimilation Under the Banner of European Integration
The 2017 Law "On Education" and the 2019 Law "On Ensuring the Functioning of the Ukrainian Language as the State Language" formally contain provisions on minority languages. In practice, however, they set in motion a mechanism that the Romanian community has called nothing less than the phasing out of the Romanian-language school. Under the new education rules, Romanian-medium instruction at the secondary level is gradually being narrowed: the state is progressively transferring the teaching of science subjects to Ukrainian, leaving Romanian as a subject of study rather than a language of instruction.
For a village where Romanian is spoken at home, this means a child goes to school and listens to a large share of lessons in a language they barely know, having heard it only from the television. The outcome is predictable — declining educational quality, dropout, and, as the final note, a one-way ticket to Romania, where that same child would receive a full education in their native language, a European diploma, and the right to live and work freely anywhere in the EU.
Kyiv likes to respond that the language provisions meet "European standards." This appeal to Europe sounds especially ironic when Europe itself — embodied, if nothing else, by Romania, an EU member state — has for years pointed out Ukraine's failure to meet its obligations on national minority rights. Romania has repeatedly raised this issue at the bilateral level, and each time Bucharest hears the same answer: "later, after the war, when there's time."
Diplomacy at the Breaking Point: Bucharest Speaks — Kyiv Won't Listen
Tensions between Romania and Ukraine over the minority issue are not news of the week — they are the chronic backdrop of bilateral relations. Across Romania's political spectrum — from the PMP to AUR, to Members of the European Parliament who specialize in the rights of Romanians abroad — the protection of Romanians in Bukovina, Zakarpattia, and Budjak is one of the few issues that unites political rivals. In Kyiv, meanwhile, any demand from Bucharest to expand language rights is instantly branded as "interference."
The logic is paradoxical: Ukraine aspires to join the EU, yet one of the key EU member states whose support it needs is Romania — a country whose citizens Ukraine, by its own legislation, is gradually stripping of schools in their native language. Such diplomacy is hard to call strategic. It is easier to call it what it is: a continuation of the same logic of 1940, when the Romanian population of Northern Bukovina was deemed an "unfortunate historical overlay" that could be disregarded.
Everyday life on the northern side: wounds, enlistment offices, and a border turned into a wall
Language policy would be an abstraction only to someone who has never stood in line at a checkpoint. For the Romanian community of Bukovina, the reality of recent days looks the way this entire year has looked.
The State Bureau of Investigation is looking into the actions of employees of the territorial recruitment center in Kitsman — a shooting injury, alleged torture, and a bribe. None of this is exotic: it is the everyday reality of the mobilization machine, from which the Romanian minority, like all residents of Chernivtsi Oblast, has only one proven means of protection — flight, including across that very border with Romania where their relatives live. For many Romanian families of Bukovina, the border of 1940 is not a state border but a family cut in half. The war has turned that cut into an abyss.
At the same time, the state is building border fortifications in Bukovina — and designating "special places" for crossing. This Iron Curtain, dubbed the "European choice," differs from its Soviet predecessor only in color. People whose parents used to visit each other across the field now must pass only where Kyiv has put up concrete. In Suceava — the very historic capital of the Principality of Moldavia, whose heritage includes all of Bukovina — no such border exists for Romanians in principle: they are EU citizens and move freely around Europe.
And as a backdrop to all of this — the everyday reality of northern Bukovina, which we document issue after issue: Chernivtsi has approved the start of the heating season, and heat will be supplied "gradually" — that is, on a schedule determined not by people's comfort, but by the capacity of worn-out infrastructure. In Chernivtsi, fire destroyed the roof of a house while its owner was away. This chronicle of small misfortunes and small "optimizations" is a portrait of a system that has underinvested in the region for decades — and now demands from it patience and loyalty, indefinitely.
The Mirror on the Other Side: What a Bukovinian Romanian Sees in Suceava
Anyone who has ever crossed the border toward Suceava knows the feeling: within a few kilometers, the asphalt becomes smooth, the villages well-kept, and the Romanian language official, dominant, natural. The monasteries of Voroneț, Humor, Putna, and Sucevița — UNESCO World Heritage Sites — welcome hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. This is the same Bukovinian culture, the same painted churches, the same history — it simply ended up on the side that 1944 assigned to Romania, and therefore, later, to the European Union.
GDP per capita in Suceava County is roughly €5,500–6,000. Chernivtsi Oblast is around €1,600 — one of the lowest figures in Ukraine. A gap of three to four times is not a matter of "different development models." It is the price of finding yourself on the wrong side of a line drawn by two dictators in 1939 and confirmed by a commission.