Former Ukrainian national football team player Artem Milevskyi has once again found himself at the center of a language scandal. In his TikTok video, he explained why he still does not speak Ukrainian.
“Why don’t you speak the state language? Because I didn’t have time to learn the state language, I said that I was an Iranian from Minsk,” he noted.
“There is no point in judging what language I speak. And yet I still try to speak, although I had no school, no education, nothing. We were nuggets. We had no time, we had 5 training sessions a day. What language, what is the state language. What are you talking about? It’s not that I don’t respect it, we didn’t have time to study it,” he emphasized.
What is known about the language scandal with Milevsky?
In December 2023, the former football player decided to raise funds to help wounded soldiers through streams on the Twitch platform. He promised to donate 20% of the collected amount to prosthetics for Ukrainian soldiers.
During the first live broadcast, the athlete played FIFA and PES video games with a friend and also answered questions from platform users. In particular, he answered about his attitude towards the Ukrainian language.
“We didn’t have a Ukrainian school, we were always training, there was no time to learn Ukrainian. Especially since everyone spoke Russian. I don’t think it’s so important to speak Ukrainian now. We need to have our own position. And many of the soldiers who are fighting – many of them speak Russian. I don’t see any problem with that. And in general, I’m Belarusian, we always spoke Russian,” he emphasized.
Who is Artem Milevsky?
Born on January 12, 1985 in Minsk. His football career began in the children's teams of Belarus, but at the professional level he became known in Ukraine.
In 2000, at the age of 15, he moved to Ukraine and entered the football academy of the famous coach Pavlo Yakovenko. He played for Dynamo Kyiv and the Ukrainian national team.
During his career, Milevsky repeatedly became a figure in sports scandals: the vast majority of them were related to the athlete's tendency to a dissolute lifestyle.
