Linguistic rant

I'm getting tired of people saying that Ukrainian is descended from/related to Russian. It isn't. The two languages are related by virtue of being in the same family, but they're not even cousins.

European Russia was originally populated by Finnish-Hungarian tribes.
Russian came about when one of the sons of a Kyivan prince ran away from home, met up with a local chief, who gave him his daughter, and founded Moscow, complete with a church and priest. The language of the church was Church Slavonic. Russian is basically a mixture of Church Slavonic, spoken by the church and aristocracy, and local Finnish-Hungarian dialects, spoken by the commoners. The integration eventually brought about Russian.

Ukrainian is a descendant of the common language spoken by the Rus under the Kyivan princedom. Church Slavonic was the language of the church and the literary language, rather like ecclesiastical Latin, but did not particularly influence the vulgar language. This is actually evidenced in the Slavic chronicles, which are written in Church Slavonic, but with unavoidable traces of the vulgar language mixed in.

Russian does have some Ukrainian influence though - during the days of the Russian empire, they brought in Ukrainian tutors and educated elite, who taught in the Ukrainian language.