So, maybe that is the difference to the German language? Here in the news you can hear "die Ukraine" (the Ukraine) all the time. And usually any "rules" in the rough vicinity of political correctness, anti-discrimination or simple politeness are meticulously adhered to in German news. Which I am personally fine with.
The situation with articles and country names in German is quite different. The article is essentially affixed to many country names as a standard part of the language, and the lack or presence of the article does not immediately convey regional or sub-national status like it generally does in English.
If anything the connotation is the opposite from English -- articles are generally more attached to certain countries for which Germany has historically had significant relations (for good reasons or bad). In modern times though, it's just another fussy part of the language that one is obliged to put up with and not give a second thought to. One simply has to say "im Frankreich", "in der Türkei", "im Iran" and so forth (but also not attach the article to most other countries), and that's all there is to it.
I wish I could point to an authoritative reference for this, but that's impossible nowadays that we have the zombie internet and everything online has been reduced to shitty apps, flashcards and "didya know?" pages.
As GP said, 'English is spoken very widely in Ukraine', though he forgot to add 'now' and 'because someone needs to brigade subreddits and do damage control when UA does something stupid and exposes itself again'[0].
The whole '"the" VS lack of "the"' stems from the Russian/Ukranian language distinction somewhat resembling that 'the regions vs the country' in English.
But again, they do demand Russian speakers everywhere to use the language they claim is not even used in their own country[1] as they see it fits them.
And this is the reason they aren't bothered to demand the same treatment to the Netherlands, the Bahamas and whatever else, and that's why they don't bother with German or any other language - it's just self-esteem and identity issues absolutely, totally unrelevant to anyone in the world.
The guy says 'just promoted to an official status ... in the past month'.
So he himself confirms, what for the 33 years they didn't bother with a language 'which is spoken very widely'. And suddenly, in the year 2022, not only it's spoken 'very widely' despite being non-existent in any conceivable metric[1] before, but promoted to 'a secondary official status nonetheless' absolutely ignoring the language which is used by 30% of the country.
Imagine Ottawa declares what Mandarin is now 'promoted to an official status (not as a primary language, but to a secondary official status nonetheless)' instead of French? [2]
