The National Bank of Ukraine has decided to redesign the lettering on its new banknote after backlash over a font allegedly associated with a Russian designer.
Earlier, Kiev introduced the 2,000-hryvnia (about $45) bill as Ukraine’s highest-denomination banknote as inflation continued to rise. The note features Ukrainian poet and dissident Vasily Stus. However, it quickly sparked debate within Ukraine’s design community.
The bank said on Monday it would revise the typography after designers claimed the lettering resembled a typeface created by a Russian designer. It stressed that although no third-party fonts had been used and all graphic elements were drawn manually, the inscription would be changed to eliminate any possible associations with Russia.
The governor of Ukraine’s central bank, Andrey Pyshny, declared the banknote “must be impeccable in every detail,” adding that even the possibility of unwanted associations justified a redesign.
“A discussion emerged within the professional community over the calligraphy used for the denomination, with its style being linked to an adaptation of a typeface once created by a Russian designer… The denomination’s inscription will be changed,” he wrote on Facebook.
Kiev has stepped up efforts to purge the Russian language and Russian culture from public life in recent years, while monuments and other symbols linked to Russia have been removed. Meanwhile, the mandatory use of Ukrainian in schools and state institutions has been expanded.
The campaign intensified after the escalation of the conflict in February 2022. In December, Ukraine’s parliament stripped Russian of protections under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, while earlier this year Kiev established a legal basis for a sweeping ban on Russian literature, paving the way for the removal of such books from circulation.
Last month, a monument to novelist Mikhail Bulgakov was dismantled. Bulgakov, the Kiev-born Russian author of ‘The Master and Margarita’, is widely regarded as one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. The statue, outside the Bulgakov Museum in one of the Ukrainian capital’s best-known historic districts, was removed as part of the campaign to erase monuments and cultural landmarks associated with Russia and the Soviet past.
Despite these measures, Russian remains widely spoken across Ukraine and Russian-language content continues to circulate. Moscow has repeatedly cited the protection of Russian speakers and the restoration of their language rights among its key conditions for a peace settlement.
