Thank you for an excellent illustration of what I was talking about.

For those curious about how exactly this is distorted, briefly: Ukraine was not "part of the Russian empire that came under occasional occupation by Western powers". What is today called Ukraine was part of a single unified state called Kievan Rus, very roughly corresponding to today's European Russia + Ukraine + Belarus - indeed, it was its heartland, where the capital Kiev was located.

Once Kievan Rus disintegrated because of feudal strife between its constituent principalities, its eastern parts were overrun by the Mongols, who integrated it into their empire as a vassal state of sorts (keeping the local dukes mostly in place, but using them as glorified tax collectors, and continuing to pit them against each other to keep them weakened), whereas the western parts were overrun by the then-ascendant Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which annexed the land outright, and mostly integrated the local nobility into its own hierarchy. Map:

https://i.imgur.com/gXBDOJd.png

This is the point at which then-unified (mostly) East Slavic culture and language breaks apart. Western parts get more exposure to European culture, initially via Lithuania, and later also via Poland when the two form a commonwealth; Catholicism partially (but not wholly) replaces Eastern Orthodoxy, and language gets borrowings from Polish and Latin. Eastern parts get more exposure to the (then mostly Turkic) Mongol culture, with Eastern Orthodoxy becoming even more entrenched per Mongols' usual policy of supporting local religions and using them to control the rulers, and the language gets many Turkic borrowings.

If you look at the map again, you'll see that the Mongol parts are (roughly) what would eventually become Russia, and the Lithuanian parts are what would eventually become Ukraine and Belarus.

The parent is technically true that there was no state called "Ukraine" before WW1. But there was definitely a nation, calling itself and its language Ukrainian, and distinct from the neighboring Russians and Poles, whose statehood mostly dominated over the corresponding territory.

The "Cyrillic writing" point is similarly bogus - Cyrillic alphabet and Eastern Slavic language was used heavily in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as well, to the point of becoming the main language for clerical and legal works. First printed books in Eastern Slavic were printed in GDL. However, it would be incorrect to refer to that language as "Russian". It was an ancestor language common to modern Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. Historically, wherever that language was spoken, its speakers generally referred to it as "Rusian" (as in "language of Rus"). In Western sources, it is usually referred to as Ruthenian. Conflating it with Russian is one of the tricks played in this kind of propaganda.

TL;DR version is that there's a substitution trick here: Russia claims to be the sole legitimate successor to Kievan Rus, and all other successor states to be "breakaway parts" (ironic, given where Kiev is located). A rough analogy would be if Italy said that it's the Roman Empire, and France and Spain are its breakaway provinces, and do not constitute nations in their own right.