Vladimir Putin said he annexed Crimea and much of the Donbas region to “save” its Russophone population. The claim infuriates Volodymyr Rafeyenko, a distinguished Ukrainian novelist who was born in Russian-speaking Donetsk and who wrote and published entirely in Russian until ten years ago.
“It was an out and out lie, aimed at a western audience," Rafeyenko says aboht Putin’s comments. "My conscience began to hurt. I was 46 years old and didn’t know Ukrainian. I decided to learn it to a level where I could speak and write it.”
I’m not sure Ukrainian is so different from Russian that it would take very much to learn to speak it and write it. Then again I’m no novelist.
It is quite different. I don’t speak either, but when watching Servant of the People, I could pick up a lot of words in Russian, as they were similar to Slovenian. When they started speaking Ukrainian, I couldn’t understand anything. Even the show makes a plot point of this, when they invite the wrong Korea because the words for north and south are different.
I used to be fluent in Russian and I can understand both just as well.