Ukrainian

No. Ukrainian and Russian are separate East Slavic languages — closely related but with distinct grammar, vocabulary, and sound systems. Lexical similarity between the two is around 60%, comparable to Spanish and Italian, not the high 90s often misstated. Ukrainian also shares more features with Polish and Belarusian than Russian does. Many Ukrainians are bilingual in Russian for historical reasons, but the languages are mutually intelligible only with significant effort.

Ukrainian Cyrillic uses ї (yi), є (ye), і (i), and ґ (g) that Russian Cyrillic doesn't have, and lacks Russian's ё, ы, э, and ъ. The result is an alphabet visually similar but immediately distinguishable. Ukrainian also marks a hard 'g' (ґ) separately from a softer 'h' sound (г), where Russian uses г for the hard 'g'.

Ukrainian preserves a seventh case used specifically for direct address that most other Slavic languages have lost or merged. Maria (nominative) becomes Маріє (Marie!) when calling out to her. The vocative is rare in modern Russian (preserved only in fixed religious forms like Боже!) but fully functional in Ukrainian, applied to most masculine and feminine nouns whenever someone is being addressed directly.

Ukraine, where it's the constitutional sole official language and the dominant language of education and government. Substantial communities live in Russia, Poland, Canada, the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Romania, Slovakia, and across Europe — many recently swelled by displacement after 2022. Ukrainian-language media, education, and cultural production have grown dramatically in scale during the past decade.

About on par with Russian in difficulty, with seven cases, three genders, verb aspect, and a Cyrillic script. Reading the script takes a couple of weeks. The case system is the longest part of the curve. Vocabulary draws from Slavic, Polish, Old Church Slavonic, and various neighbouring languages, with relatively few cognates with English compared to Romance languages.