Yeah but the bigger problem is abundance of Russian teachers and lack of any other language teachers.

>I agree that it's not really neccessary, but why even teach it? I

There was still a lot of trade with Russia, especially before 2010's-ish. On top of that due to Soviet Union there were a lot of Russian teachers and very few of other languages. It wasn't much of idealogical choice, more just practical.

No one is banning anything. This is 2nd language option in schools. Russian already has been an useless historical leftover. Almost everyone had to learn Russian because we only had Russian teachers and no other options. Absolutely no one uses it past their school (it's 99.9% English).

Looking at where people go to study for their degree, it's Scandinavia, Germany, Netherlands, so any of those languages would make more sense.

Even French would make more sense that Russiam considering that it is still commonly used as diplomacy language.

The discrimination has been other way around, Russian was de-facto 2nd foreign language just because of abundance of Russian teachers from Soviet times. If you wanted any other option you are either completely out of luck, or lucky enough to go to some special school that had German or French as an option. Something like Spanish of Mandarin is completely out of equation.

No one from my generation (gen Z) who weren't Russian speaking to begin with can do anything with Russian beyond saying basics. It's just not used anymore.

And when it comes to education options, I am also yet to hear anyone studying in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine or any other Russian speaking country to warrant it. Most people go to US, Germany, France, South Korea, Denmark, Netherlands (statistics), so that Russian language is just a leftover that doesn't really practically help.

Even in business, we actually have projects right now with Ukrainian company, before that a Belarusian... We all communicate in English. All tools and documentation are in English, it would be akward to speak about those terms and have to make some weird Russian-English words so even that comes organically (tech company).

It was happening naturally. Most young people are very fluent in English and just learn some Russian to get by in school. Other languages have also became a bit more popular (French, German, Mandarin).

I feel like the whole "let's push Russian out" is a bit populist and not needed, the language itself didn't do anything and again, it was being phased out "organically" already.

Company I work with had outsourced some projects to both Belarus and Ukraine, everyone's 3rd language here (Baltics) is Russian, yet, we all still communicate in English.