severniyYour thoughts are correct - Putin sees that Ukrainians, Belarusians and russians are the one nation with the same language, while Ukrainian and Belarusian are the dialects of russian. While Ukrainian from the west part of the country could have never heard russian won’t understand it.
And russian who lives in ukraine even for a huge amount of time could barely understand Ukrainian. How the languages could be the same?!
And yesterday one russian historian said - I never listen to Putin. He’s a KGB agent. Main goal of his speeches is to misinform you. While you spend time to understand his words and what will be next — he attacks you.
Yeah, the best way to compare Ukrainian from Russian, and really any Slavic language is to look at French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, and other romance languages...
The root language is sorta the same, but ultimately, they use a ton of different words, and even sometimes different alphabets, or at least different characters...
HISTORY LESSON WOOT
Hell, Russian actually has a lot more French cognates simply because Pyotr 1/Peter the Great idolized France at the time (as did everyone - French at the time sorta became the language of business, commerce, and aristocracy, just as English has become today) and PtG introduced a ton of French words into Russian.
'Comrade', for example... Isn't actually Russian.. that word is absolutely borrowed indirectly from the French language, just as the word 'camaraderie' in English is directly taken directly from French.
aside*** Comrade is a double-borrowed word for Russian, since it was borrowed from the 19th century German socialist movement that grew in the early years of the industrial revolution - early socialists/communists searching for a more egalitarian term to call everyone started using Kamrade - a word that I would assume was already borrowed from French, which then reverse-import influenced the French to take up the term in liu of citoyen in their own socialist movements at the time. Kamrade in German, was already a borrowed word from French... however, this word is probably just as prevalent in Ukranian, as Russian since it was so heavily used during many decades of soviet union, so it's actually a terrible example for the argument I am attempting to make. But I already made it, so fuck it. Glad I'm not being graded on this assignment, and I hope resident History Professor @ModMommy doesn't rip me for this post and embarrass me in front of the class.
Ukranian language and culture itself is a lot closer related to Polish, as both regions were part of the same nation - the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, for a much longer part of their history than they were during the 19th century Russian Empire and the 20th century Soviet Union years. You could tie Kiev, and everything west of the Dnipro in particular far more to both the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania for about 600+ years dating from the Mongol invasions, and even moreso, prior to them, with the Dnipro river serving as a main eastern trade route from the Viking lands to the Black Sea and Constantinople... Russia and Ukraine were never
really part of the same nation until the Russian Empire, and Kingdom of Prussia carved up the region leading into the 19th century...
They don't even share the same Cyrillic alphabet. It's like when one of us North Americans try to read Icelantic and see characters and letters that we don't even know what to make a sound for.
TL;DR/THE POINT IS...
UKRAINE IS NOT RUSSIA AND VISE VERSA
Saying Ukranians are Russian is like saying Spanish and Italians are the same just because their languages are about 2/3rds intelligible between themselves, and they were part of the same empire over 1000 years ago/share the same Christian denomination... when in fact, they have different histories, experiences, and intrinsically different cultural customs and values dating back hundreds of years to the end of the Mongol Invasions and the Golden Hoarde.
