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Can you tell a Russian from Ukrainian? Can you even tell an Ukrainian name from Russian name?


There's a bunch of phonetical differences:

  rus. Volk ~ ukr. Vovk
  rus. Aleksey ~ ukr. Oleksiy
Different suffixes:

   rus. Tarasov ~ ukr. Tarasenko, Tarasiuk
Ukrainian surnames often have no suffixes at all (more often than in Russia):

  rus. Melnikov vs. ukr. Melnyk
  rus. Kovalev vs. ukr. Koval
Although it doesn't say anything about a person's nationality for certain because of migrations.


This is akin to asking if someone can tell an German name from a French name. Sure, there are some shared ones, but for most intents and purposes locals can easily tell the two apart.


It's more like telling a German name from an Austrian name.


Russia really isn't that similar to the rest of the Eastern Bloc. Even in language, the other Slavic languages are pretty close to one another, whereas Russian is pretty different. Same for culture etc. Russia is trying very hard to create the impression, that it's all the same, in the hopes of eventually occupying neighbors again, but it really isn't.


Russian is a Slavic language and very similar to other Slavic languages especially Ukrainian and Belarusian. Far closer than German and French. I have family across 5 different Slavic countries and hear various Slavic languages regularly. You're just spewing complete bs for political reasons apparently.


I speak most of the languages you listed on a conversational level, but sure, it's easier to cry about astroturfing than consider that you might be wrong.


Cool story bud.

Wow. Can you tell a Korean person from Chinese person? Polish name from a Czech one?

Different cultures, different languages, it's obvious to the locals.


[flagged]


Thankfully, people living on the east are completely immune to ethnic stereotypization and propaganda, like you clearly demonstrate. They even get to have their own opinions. Oh the wonders of geography and lineage.


LOL. Have you ever read what Ukrainians said in the last 35 years? Not some pretty recital from CNN, ABC, BBC, DW, but actual words said and written by actual Ukrainians?

Or, for that matter, have you ever read Reddit? I'm 100% sure that if I open any subreddit like /r/politics, in the first 10 posts there will be something like "burn all Russians", "we must nuke Russia", "Russian are subhumans and they must be eliminated from Earth". Such phrases are so pervading there that I stopped visiting reddit even for reading technical subreddits. BTW, Reddit moderators never ban users for calling to kill Russians (also, in 2022 Meta openly said it is ok to say such things openly, just to note that nazism is welcome in the West, or to be precise, it never went away and it wasn't an invention of Hitler).


Yes, people say a lot of dumb and reductive shit everywhere, I've been around. What I'm saying is that while it's entirely reasonable to get upset about it and react accordingly, you also have the option of exercising self-awareness and agency, and not swing the pendulum the other way.

Case in point, maybe the most rational action to take after reading something that strikes you as stereotypization is probably not whipping out a stereotype about "westerners" or whatever of your own. Where the dividing line between west and east moves around about as much as the dividing line between balkan and not balkan, of course.




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