Putin has talked up the “historical unity” of Ukraine and Russia through their shared Slavic past quite a lot and as partial justification for the war, particularly evidenced through their languages. A lot of Americans have had an averse knee-jerk reaction to this and shot back that Ukraine is distinct, it’s important to comprehend what exactly this means, and its implications for “historical unity.” The two languages are very similar, and knowing this can lend an extra dimension to the conflict and how we interpret Putin’s purported Slavic origins.
I can understand Russian (although speaking efficiently is a different story) and by extension, I can understand a good deal of Ukrainian. Although I suspect it’s because he makes his speeches very simple on purpose, I can also understand Zelenski. Let’s look at the latter half of that sentence in both languages:
Також можна мені почути зеленський (Ukranian)
Тоже можно мне почуте зеленский (Russian)
As you can see, these pretty closely resemble each other and although Ukrainian took on the i (more often seen in their Baltic neighbours to the West) it’s more or less phonetically identical. The letter ‘o’ in можно is pronounced ‘a’ and the pronouns мне and мені are almost impossible to distinguish by pronunciation. The only real difference is Також, but the Russian variant can also be said 'также' which is also pretty similar. Regardless, I can still type both sentences using my Russian language settings.
Additionally, their short lexical distance to the same variant of Slavic means their language can almost seem to be identical at times. A lot of ‘core words’ of Slavic are still retained in both- in other words, the roots that make up a good deal of the foundational language of either are the same, and means they share over half of the same vocabulary. Slavic languages are extremely root heavy, so this means quite a lot of overlap. For example, English has several distinct words to describe related concepts: feeling, sense, emotion, empathy. With respect to order, the Slavic equivalents are почуство, чувство, чувствовать, сочувство. You only need to understand the root чувст and the structure of Slavic to comprehend the meaning of every single word here without even so much as glancing at a dictionary because of how Slavic is structured so heavily on adding to roots. On top of all this, a great deal of Ukrainians are actually native to Russian and learned Ukrainian second, thanks to the occupation by the Soviet Union which, relatively, ended extremely recently.
However, this similarity isn’t evidence of a Slavic “historical unity” and in fact, it points to the opposite. In their relationship since they united under Kievan Rus in the 13th century, the Rus fell very comfortably into the dominant role with its empires and Tsardoms, and although the Ukrainian language took on words and some structures from Polish and Сzech, their constant presence ensured that it never wandered very far. The Ukranian language has not fully demarcated from Russian or taken too much from immediate neighbors because it’s never had the opportunity to. It’s a hodgepodge mashup of different Baltic and Polish words held under the rules of the Russian Slavic dialect, almost like it’s afraid to break them- because for the better part of a thousand years, it literally wasn’t allowed to.
The similarity of languages isn’t an indication that Ukraine should be part of Russia anymore than America should be part of England. We don’t need to contradict historians on the shared ancestry of the two in order to argue that Ukraine should be fully independent. Sovereignty doesn’t require a complete ethnolinguistic fracturing- otherwise, we’d still be a colony.
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