Ukrainian parliamentarian recommends beating students AND teachers with sticks for speaking Russian

A member of the Ukrainian far-right party Svoboda has suggested that both students and teachers should be beaten with sticks is they are caught speaking Russian in a school. The suggestion comes even though Russian is the lingua-franca for much of the population of Ukraine and is frequently spoken in public, private and in the work place across all regions.

This hasn’t stopped Igor Miroshnichenko from stating,

“If you enter a regular Ukrainian school, then you will hear that everyone is speaking in Russian, including teachers and educators in the kindergartens. Shall we return to sticks? Sometimes it is needed to use them, because if in the Ukrainian-language school teachers allow themselves to speak Russian, they show a bad example for children, certainly”.

Political beatings are a frequent occurrence in post-coup Ukraine, but taking such tactics to schools would be a new one.