In short — no, that is untrue.

The myth that Ukrainian is merely a dialect of Russian was invented by Russians. Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian are three distinct East Slavic languages, each with its own system, history, and path of development. Historical and linguistic evidence confirms this.

Research demonstrates that Ukrainian began evolving early and independently, directly from the Proto-Slavic period. On the territory of today’s Ukraine, a union of Slavic tribes had already formed in the 4th–7th centuries, creating an environment of close linguistic interaction. It was within this milieu that the future Ukrainian language started to emerge, based on local dialects. Russian, by contrast, developed much later and in a completely different region.

Numerous phonetic and grammatical features that arose during the Old Ukrainian period (11th–14th centuries) attest to the language’s independent evolution and distinguish it from other Slavic tongues. The first written evidence of a Ukrainian language distinct from other Slavic languages (in particular from Russian) appears in a chronicle dated 1073. Another key source is the graffiti on the walls of Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, dating to the 11th–12th centuries, which clearly show that Kyiv’s inhabitants already spoke Ukrainian (scholars refer to it as Old Ukrainian). This is evident in systemic phonetic traits (reflecting spoken language), vocabulary (native words absent elsewhere), and grammar (e.g., the vocative case and distinctive case endings).

Just as various written monuments of the 11th–12th centuries contain unmistakable signs of Old Ukrainian, some documents from the same era show features of the Novgorodian language (which, according to Slavic linguists, might have become a separate language had Muscovite expansion not destroyed the Novgorod state). In the 13th–14th centuries many texts exhibit clear Belarusian traits, while there is no evidence of the language that would later be called Russian (Great Russian).

Over time Ukrainian retained its own phonetic characteristics and unique grammatical and lexical features, together forming a system distinct from any other language. It has preserved traits that do not exist in any dialect of Russian.

For more on how old the Ukrainian language is, we wrote about it here.