Ukrainian vs Russian
To outsiders, a Ukraine person will look almost the same as a person from Russia. As Ukraine was a former part of the former USSR bloc (Socialist Republic of Soviet Union), this is expected, but to Russians and Ukrainians the differences will be as clear as the difference between Chinese and Thai food. Even though people from both independent countries share similar ethnicity, race and history, all countries have their unique traditions and cultures; so do these two. The first difference between the two countries is their national flag, and all the related emblems and anthems, as well as many other different things. Russia’s flag is a tricolor of white, blue and red, while Ukraine’s flag has yellow and blue colors.
Russia is the larger subset country of which Ukraine was once a part. There still exists a feeling among many people for the two countries to re-unite into the former glory of Mother Russia. They exist together in the same way as CIS today, or the Commonwealth of Independent States. Ultra-nationalistic militants, on one hand, want to re-unite Mother Russia to its former glory, while ultra-radical separatists want to break it further because of the torture they allegedly suffered during the post-war cold-war-era dictatorship period under USSR. Russia comparatively faces very few terrorist attacks compared to Ukraine. Ukraine is near to the western countries of central Europe, and if one wasn’t told that it was a part of the former USSR, one would think that it was an independent European country, like Greece and Italy, which are located in its vicinity.
The languages of both countries are very similar, and if you use any Russian language translation software, it will work for Ukrainian and vice versa. An easy way to differentiate the scripts would be to look for lots of instances of a letter that looks like an English ‘I’, with two dots over it (Ñ—) ‘“ that would be Ukrainian; if not, then it would be Russian. They are similar because both are Slavic languages, but they are both considered two different languages, and not two different dialects of the same language. One other major difference, is that in Ukrainian the ‘g’ sounds like an ‘h’. Both languages have descended from a common ancestor ‘“ ‘Proto-Eastern Slavic’, and they branched out from it around 1500 years ago.
Ukrainian has a lot of Polish influence, since it was a dominion of Poland for a long time. Ironically, the very first capital of Russia was Kiev, and was ruled by the Grand Prince of Kiev. Ukrainians refer to Vodka as ‘Gorilka’. Tray is pronounced as ‘pidnos’ in Ukrainian and ‘podnos’ in Russian. Just like in English, the way British English is different from American English (stronger intonation and force on the words), the Slavic languages are similar – Ukrainian is more like the British English.
Summary:
1) Ukrainian has stronger intonation than Russian.
2) Ukraine was a part of USSR/Russia, and is a much smaller country.
3) Ukraine’s flag is of totally different colors compared to Russia’s, which is not the case with the Australia/England flags.