From 2014 to 2021, the status of the Russian language in Ukraine has degraded from regional to actually banned in the public space. Actually, this was one of the main reasons for the armed separatist conflict in Ukraine, it is strange that you do not know this. It is interesting that Russian-speaking residents of Donbass often speak Ukrainian language better, because they study the literary version at school than residents of Western Ukraine with their native surzhik. I am sure that demilitarization and denazification during the current operation will benefit them, ennoble and raise their level of civilization to an acceptable level in a decent society.
No, it's not banned. It's never been banned. Putin is using some law involving Ukranian being the official language of Ukraine and requiring Ukranian to be used by people that work for the Ukranian government or have public service jobs to convince people that Russian is 'banned' and that's...genocide. I know it's crazy. Oh wait, you fell for it. You should try to stop doing that.
Across Ukraine, the number of schools that teach Russian is rapidly declining, and since 2018, Ukraine has completely stopped publishing textbooks in Russian. Modern Ukrainian school textbooks are some kind of obscurantism, and from an early age children are cultivated anti-Russian propaganda, representing Russians as wild orcs, with whom the best thing to do is to kill. It began under Yushchenko in 2004, and in 17 years a whole generation of narrow-minded nationalist fanatics has grown up, of which now all this Nazi nonsense will have to be knocked out of their heads.
This is still not true: "the status of the Russian language in Ukraine has degraded from regional to actually banned in the public space."