Posted on 03/30/2014 1:28:16 PM PDT by annalex
Similar enough to pick pigeon versions of either one casually, — however you won’t be a fluent and clean speaker that way. The areas between Ukraine and Russia, — both sides of the border, — have people speaking some mix: Russian with Ukrainian words thrown in and with Ukrainian accent, or vice versa. However, cultured speech is quite different and not always self-evident, especially if you are not from these parts. In the West you can hear that it is a different language because in the West they don’t mix vocabularies and at times are not fluent in Russian.
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