A bill has been registered in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine that proposes replacing the change coin “kopeck” with “shag”. Among the initiators of this legislative initiative are the Speaker of Parliament Ruslan Stefanchuk, First Deputy Oleksandr Korniienko, and Deputy Speaker Olena Kondratiuk. The document was submitted for consideration on October 1.
This is reported by Kyiv24
Historical Justification for Renaming the Coin
As noted in the explanatory note, although a monetary reform took place in Ukraine in 1996 and the national currency hryvnia was introduced, it has not been possible to completely sever ties with Soviet and Russian traditions in monetary circulation. To this day, the name of the change coin – “kopeck” – remains official, which, according to the authors of the document, symbolizes a connection with Russia.
“As a result, even 34 years after the declaration of independence, there exists a denominator in Ukraine’s monetary circulation that still unites our country with Russia – the name of the change coin ‘kopeck’, which is enshrined at the legislative level.”
Decolonization of the Monetary System and the Significance of the ‘Shag’
According to the authors of the bill, in the current conditions of large-scale aggression by the Russian Federation, the abandonment of the kopeck in favor of the historical Ukrainian name – “shag” – is an important step in the process of decolonization. They emphasize that out of the 15 countries that were part of the USSR, the kopeck has only remained in circulation in three states: Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and also in the so-called “Transnistria”. The preservation of this name, as stated in the explanatory note, supports the connection between Ukraine and hostile narratives.
The leadership of the National Bank of Ukraine expressed the initiative to replace the kopeck with the shag as early as last year. The head of the NBU, Andriy Pyshny, noted that the kopeck is a coin of Russian origin, and its removal aligns with the policy of decolonization. Historically, the term “shag” was used in Ukrainian lands in the 16th–17th centuries, is mentioned in the works of classic Ukrainian literature, and was proposed by Mykhailo Hrushevskyi as the name for the change coin during the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921. When the hryvnia was introduced in 1992, the idea of naming the change coin “shag” was also considered, but at that time the name “kopeck” was chosen instead.