This is still not true: "the status of the Russian language in Ukraine has degraded from regional to actually banned in the public space."
It seems you live in an illusory information bubble, having little contact with reality. Stores in Ukraine massively refused to serve Russian-speaking customers. In the bars of Ukraine, Russian speech could easily become a strong argument for a fight. Ukrainians are bilingual people and their attempt to ban the Russian language is absurd, because linguistically the Ukrainian language is not a self-sufficient dialect of Russian.