the number of russian speakers is much higher due to the fact that in the soviet times there were m citizens and they were all educated in russian another m studied and were able to speak in this language it is highly unreasonable to have just m first language speaker we are talking about language and not ethnicity there are m russians in russia and they all speak in russian plus m russian speakers in ukraine all ukrainians know russian m and all the belarussians speak in russian m millions of russian speakers as a first language in central asia and so on