Kiril Budanov to pay fine after public use of Russian, language commissioner says

Ukraine's presidential chief of staff, Kiril Budanov, will pay a monetary fine after acknowledging that he spoke Russian in public, the country's Commissioner for the Protection of the State Language, Elena Ivanovska, announced.

Legal process and public reaction

Ivanovska said that appropriate legal proceedings were initiated and that Budanov admitted the violation without attempting to justify it. "The fact that a violation of the law occurred was acknowledged without any attempt to find justification," she wrote on Facebook.

The commissioner added that state supervision will continue according to the prescribed procedure and that communication with Budanov was carried out within legal bounds. The imposed fine will be paid within the legally established deadline, and Ivanovska stressed that such cases must be handled through legal channels rather than by public shaming on social networks.

The proceedings were triggered by a video from November 2 showing Budanov speaking Russian with a 14-year-old boy in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka in Kyiv Oblast. The recording sparked outrage among some users of Ukrainian social networks, particularly on the Threads platform, because a senior Ukrainian official used Russian in a public encounter.

According to reports, Budanov arrived at the site after a cellar was discovered where, at the time, armed persons allegedly held about 40 people. Among those removed from the cellar was the 14-year-old boy, whose circumstances of being in that location raised additional public questions and reactions.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also commented earlier, noting that Budanov spoke to the boy in Russian and then ironically asked how large a fine would be imposed on the head of the Ukrainian president's office, Volodymyr Zelensky, for using the Russian language.

Photo: press material from the event