Russian city of Krasnodar considers removing "unpatriotic" signs as war wages on

Krasnodar, a city in southern Russia, may soon get rid of all billboards and signs that are not in Russian, as per a fresh proposal put out by the local government, RT reported. 

The prospective shift and other changes to the Regulations on Supply of Urban Facilities will be debated in public hearings scheduled for late April, the city administration announced on Friday. Residents in the area would have two weeks to review the suggested improvements, it was stated.

"This seems a bit unpatriotic," says Krasnodar's mayor on foreign language billboards

The effort was started in response to the city's mayor, Evgeny Naumov statement in February that there were several signs and billboards in the city that were in other languages. "We have a lot of signs in English and who knows what other languages… Given the situation our country has found itself in, this seems a bit unpatriotic,” he noted alluding to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine and the standoff between Russia and the West.

At the federal level, similar concepts have also been advanced. Russian State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin claimed in June 2022 that the lower house of parliament was considering a ban on signage that were in other languages. The chairwoman of the Duma Committee for Culture, Elena Yampolskaya, claimed at the time that there were between 30% and 50% more signs throughout Moscow using the Latin alphabet than those using the Russian alphabet.

RT in a report said Moscow's business ombudswoman Tatyana Mineeva says that the initiative has encountered criticism from the private sector, with shop owners noting that replacing billboards would be a very expensive operation. Early in December, a motion banning advertisements in foreign tongues was formally submitted to the Duma. Trademarks, however, are exempt from the potential ban. The project is being examined right now.

Russian government representatives are already subject to some limitations on the usage of foreign terms. A law prohibiting the use of "words and expressions that do not correspond to the norms of modern Russian" in formal contexts was signed by President Vladimir Putin in late February, with the exception of terminology that lacks an equivalent in the official language.