In recent months, millions of books have been withdrawn by the Ukrainian authorities from the libraries of their competence and have not determined what they have done with them. According to the Reuters portal, 19 million books, belonging to the "Soviet era" or in Russian, have been withdrawn. They have used mainly arguments related to language. Deputy Director of the Ukrainian Parliament's Committee on Humanitarian Policy and Information, Yevheniya Kravchuk, stressed that the "proportion of books in Russian and Ukrainian" in Ukrainian libraries is "regrettable", as 44% are written in Russian.

According to a 2019 survey by the International Institute of Sociology in Kiev, half of the population speaks only or mainly in Ukrainian and 30% in Russian. Today, however, the only official language in Ukraine is Ukrainian.

As for the censorship of millions of books, Kravchuk has given some data: of the 19 million books discarded, 11 million were written in Russian. It therefore seems that the reasons are not exclusively linguistic. Millions of Ukrainian books have also been withdrawn from libraries, which, according to Kravchuk, are "from the Soviet era". Proposals for the disposal of books by authors who "have protected the armed attack on the Ukraine" are also apparently on the table.

Reuters recalled that the Ukrainian Government launched Russian book reduction policies in 2014 to "further break cultural ties" between Ukraine and Russia. But a year ago, with the outbreak of war, this process intensified.