Petition to strip Potap of Peopleʼs Artist title submitted to the Prime Minister and SBU

President Volodymyr Zelensky forwarded a petition to the Prime Minister Serhiy Koretsky and acting the SBU head Oleksandr Poklad to strip Potap of the title of Honored Artist for consideration.

This petition on the Presidentʼs Office (OP) website gathered the necessary 25 000 signatures in early September. It appeared due to Potapʼs public statements about the Ukrainian language and culture.

In particular, in August, the artist released a provocative video with his wife Nastya Kamensky. At the beginning of the video, they pretended to be writhing in pain. And in the second part, they posed smiling on a yacht.

They accompanied the video sequence with the caption: "God, please forgive us for speaking Russian. We have completely forgotten that there is such a thing as freedom."

"I thank everyone who joined this petition for their active civic stance and for supporting initiatives aimed at protecting the Ukrainian cultural and information space from Russian influence and narratives," the presidentʼs response reads.

In parallel, a petition is being collected to strip Kamensky of her Peopleʼs Artist title. Shortly before that, she gave an interview to a Russian journalist, where she stated that after a long conversation in Ukrainian, she developed a cyst, so she switched to Russian for the sake of her health.

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