Comments by "1midnightfish" (@1midnightfish) on "Украинцы и русские - один и тот же народ? Мы спросили украинцев." video.

I agree with the sentiment you're expressing but I have a question: why does everyone keep speaking of russia as Ukraine's "big brother"? Isn't that just repeating and amplifying russian propaganda? I have no Slavic background whatsoever (Anglo-Italian) and I only started learning Ukrainian a year ago, so maybe I'm missing something here
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@yandex9188 Ukrainian and Polish speakers also understand each other pretty well... As an Italian speaker I can pick up a lot of what Spanish speakers say, but Italian and Spanish are undeniably different languages. Ukrainians tend to be fluent in russian because it's a language they have learned, while russians aren't as fluent in Ukrainian as Ukrainians are in russian, unless they've made the effort to learn the language.
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@yandex9188 Anyone who believes that Ukrainian is a "dialect" of russian demonstrates, among other things, a complete lack of understanding of what a dialect is. I've only been learning Ukrainian for a year, but I work with languages and it's very clear to me that russian and Ukrainian are as different as Spanish and French, at least. Not that they need to be that different to be seen as two different languages: Spanish and Italian have more in common than Spanish and French, and they're also different languages
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Nationality, language, history...?
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@silver7719 Thank you for replying and taking me back to this thread. Since then I've become better at countering this "Slavic brotherhood" thing whenever it comes up - it irritates me to see so many people from outside the region pick up on this piece of language and regurgitate it without thinking. I also usually take the opportunity to quote the opening line of Kozak System's Наш Маніфест 😁 Слава Україні 💙💛 Переможете
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@yandex9188 Oh so you're one of those articulate trolls, you think you should be taken seriously because you can form proper sentences, that's how low the standards are in your culture nowadays. I can just imagine what would happen if I started saying that I believe any language is artificial and inferior compared to any other, but some russians, like yourself, think they should be indulged by the rest of the world when they make these pronouncements about Ukrainian. I happen to believe that the russian federation is artificial as a country, and vastly inferior to Ukraine and most other countries in that respect... but I was keeping that to myself because I didn't want to offend anyone. Thank you for helping me change my mind on that point. The only russians I should worry about offending are the ones who wouldn't be offended by such a statement, because they agree.
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