> I recall you saying there were "big" cultural differences

I didn't, it was someone else who made the claim, but as far as I can tell it's true. It's also true that there are great similarities, but at the end of the day the two countries are different, and have been for a long time.

An Englishman could say "I don't see big cultural differences between us and the Scots or the Irish, we're the same people", but that would be very ignorant. Just like Ukraine and Russia, simply because they share some cultural elements, doesn't mean they're the same people, the same country or have the same culture or history. In fact, the deeper you dive, the more differences you find.

But I can see that when you're not looking, it may appear that the differences are minor. I can't speak to your personal experience, but from my point of view (I'm not a citizen of Ukraine or Russia; in fact I'm a Russian ethnic), there are significant differences between the two populations, not just culturally.

> Both sources you sent are Ukranian sites...

Really? Confirmation was literally a Google search away. I put in the effort to find the sources and you couldn't confirm them?

Confirmation of source #1, from a non-Ukrainian website. For context, since you couldn't be bothered to look it up, Nikolai Trubetzkoy was a Russian linguist and historian who founded morphophonology. The passage I quoted is reproduced in this book (but I'm pretty sure you can find it in German books too, if you're curious):

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=qcE2CwAAQBAJ

Confirmation of source #2, in live video from kremlin.ru at 36:30. http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20603

> I got it from here: https://thecrashcourse.com/courses/russia-the-kievan-rus-and...

Hmm, sounds like an extremely lossy compression. Using this type of hand-wavy abstraction of details we can indeed conclude that not only are Russians and Ukrainians the same but also Belorussians, Latvians and Moldavians.

> It's more about to which culture you want to belong to, not so much about where you have been born or which language you speak.

Most people don't actively seek to make this choice, they simply live their lives and belong to a culture or another, so this is a bit of a red herring.

> It's the people that live today that make up a nation.

Couldn't agree more. That said, it's been 30 years since USSR collapsed, 30 years of free Ukraine. Even assuming that in USSR, Russia and Ukraine were the same country and people (reductio ad absurdum), in these last 30 years Ukraine had its own parallel history to Russia's, and are a different country with a different culture. You'd be hard-pressed to find Russians who know the name of the Ukrainian president that preceded Zelensky. Or Russians who can tell you anything about the history of Ukraine. "Same people"? I think not.

We're quickly headed to the point where there'll be fewer Ukrainians who remember living in USSR than Ukrainians who don't. As time goes on, this cultural link that was created in USSR is weakening more and more, up to the point where it will remain in some nostalgic minds of old people.

But you'll also find many old Ukrainians who are less nostalgic about USSR, and will be quick to point out that for them, USSR (well, Russia) was always the oppressor.