russian is part of what language branch
Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family. It is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus' . From the point of view of the spoken language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn, the other three languages in the East Slavic group.0% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 2% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. Russian is spoken by 1.4% of the population according to a 2009 estimate from the World Factbook.