I know little about language, but Russian does not appearr to be a root language, certainlyy not of Ukrainian.
And? what is your fucking point here?
My point is it is looking m ore like what has been said is true, Ukraine/Kiev as a culture predates Russia/Moscow,
At the start Putin said there was never a Ukrainian culture therefore he had a right to seize Ukraine and impose Russian culture and language.
IOW justifying genocide.
I wouldn't get too caught up with all of this arguing over which culture has historic rights to Kyiv/Kiev. The spelling difference is over whether one chooses to use Ukrainian or Russian Cyrillic as the basis for the romanized version of the name. The Ukrainian government wants their own official national language, Ukrainian, to be the basis, even though urban Kyiv is largely Russian speaking. Ukrainian tends to be more prevalent outside of the city, and that has to do with Russian dominance over Ukraine since the late 18th century. Ukrainian used to be more widely spoken throughout Ukraine in even the 19th century. Russian was imposed on the eastern portion (Novorossiya) after it was incorporated into the Russian Empire.
But it doesn't matter whether Ukrainians speak Ukrainian or Russian. Lenin did not "create Ukraine", as barbos falsely claimed. He is going by history as revised by Soviet Russian propagandists. Ukraine broke off from the Russian Empire and formed a Ukrainian republic and fought a
war of independence from Russia from 1917 to 1921. It was part of the Russian civil war. Most of that republic got absorbed during the war of independence into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic after the Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the Kerensky government. So it became a constituent Soviet Republic within the Soviet Union. Lenin's government merely reestablished Russian imperial control. They also reabsorbed Belarus and tried to take back Polish territory. The Poles managed to expel Trotsky's Red Army during the
Polish-Soviet War (1918-1921). That included much of what is now western Ukraine, much of which used to be Polish territory until Stalin shifted the territory and the demographics, creating an expanded Ukraine.
Russian and Ukrainian descend from the same roots in the territory of the Kievan/Kyivan Rus. However, the Mongol invasion destroyed that political entity, and the Muscovite region remained under Mongol hegemony for decades longer than the rest of the old Kievan Rus territory. That's when the division of the two languages really took hold. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania included Belarus, Ukraine, and some Muscovite territory. The Slavic divisions within it included White Ruthenian (Belarus), Red Ruthenia (Ukraine), and Black Ruthenia (Russian Muscovite). After the union by marriage between Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, parts of Red Ruthenia became Polish territory. Poles therefore thought they had a claim to the area that Moscow came to dominate and even once briefly put a Polish Tsar on the Russian throne. Parts of Ukraine were also considered Tatar territory, which ultimately became part of the Ottoman Empire. Poles, Turks, and Russians ended up battling each other for control of what is now modern Ukraine. Russia ultimately prevailed and absorbed all Ukrainian territory into its empire. The Ukraine that exists today, like Russia, is a product of all those ethnic rivalries in the past and stands as its own sovereign nation.
