A 2,000 hryvnia banknote featuring a portrait of Vasyl Stus has not yet gone into production, but has already undergone its first redesign. The reason — several lowercase letters and a person who knows the difference between a legal and pirated font.
Who raised the issue and what exactly did they notice
On July 10, on the day of the banknote's presentation, graphic designer and serviceman Bohdan Hdal published a post with a specific accusation: the inscription "Two thousand hryvnias" was executed using the Cyrillic version of the Bickham Script font, which was created in 2005 by Russian designer Oleksandra Hofman — unofficially, without a license from the original author. The difference from the legal version could be traced in the writing of the letters "я", "в", "н", and "ь".
This is not the first time Hdal has raised this issue. Back in 2019, together with font developer Andriy Shevchenko, he pointed out the same problem in the 1,000 hryvnia banknote. At that time, the National Bank of Ukraine promised to hold a competition and eliminate such cases — but the situation repeated itself on the new note.
What the NBU says and where the line lies between legal and moral
The National Bank did not deny it: the analysis confirmed the stylistic similarity. But the position of the regulator was formulated clearly by NBU Governor Andriy Pyshny:
"We will not engage in graphological discussions — the National Bank has a license, and there are no legal issues here. But for us there is a question of values. When the inscription on a banknote with Stus is associated with the work of a citizen of the aggressor country — the very fact of such an association is enough. No Russian shadows on a banknote with a poet killed by Russia."
Andriy Pyshny, NBU Governor
In other words, there is no legal problem. There is a symbolic one — and it proved to be stronger. The NBU decided to replace the inscriptions by executing them in accordance with the official Cyrillic version of Bickham Script from Adobe, which appeared only in 2016, without any author variations.
Practically: what is changing and when
- The banknote has not yet been launched into production, so the redesign will not delay its release.
- The date of introduction into circulation remains unchanged — September 4, 2026.
- New letters will be created by NBU artists in a secure environment that prevents the use of third-party font packages.
The fact that the problem repeated itself after 2019 remains unexplained by the NBU. The regulator described the internal process of creating fonts as secure — but did not clarify how Hofman's adaptation ended up in the artists' guidelines. If, on September 4, the banknote is released with corrected fonts and without a public report on how the error occurred, it would mean: the system changes the result, but not the process that led to it.
