the number of Russian speakers is much higher due to the fact that in the soviet times there were 300 M citizens and they were all educated in russian another 100 M studied and were able to speak in this language it is highly unreasonable to have just 145 M first language speaker we are talking about language and not ethnicity there are 143 M russians in russia and they all speak in russian plus 20 M russian speakers in Ukraine all ukrainians know russian 46 M and all the belarussians speak in russian 10 M millions of russian speakers as a first language in central Asia and so on