Poroshenko calls for elimination of Russian text within documents

Poroshenko said on November 19 that the request came after a petition from Ukrainians demanding the change to documents that are known as internal passports. Most internal passports in Ukraine currently carry text in Ukrainian and Russian. A resident of the western city of Lviv, Svyatoslav Litynskiy, filed a lawsuit in early 2015 against a local passport agency, demanding an internal passport with text only in Ukrainian. He won the case in May and received such a passport in August. Ukrainian-Russian relations have hit historic lows since Moscow annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and began supporting pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.