Mercenary Army Aviation Special Operations FARP Team? Where to recruit?

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

A kid who grew up in a normal, middle class home in the city of Zaporizhzhia, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, during the 1960s and 1970s, until age 15, how much Russian would they speak?

And would they have used Ukrainian for all regular conversations, at home and with friends, assuming that the parents are not Russian-speaking, but have ancestors from around there several generations back?

This was a political issue at the time in Ukraine. Parents could chose to have their children educated in Russian-speaking or Ukrainian-speaking schools. The USSR central government was trying to Russify all the non-Russian speaking peoples, although it had more sense by this time than to do that by force. Some Ukrainian-speaking parents sent their children to Russian-speaking schools to seek future advantage for them.

Is Russian a totally different language for the Ukrainian boy, while related to his and belonging to the same language family, not actually mutually intelligible, like Icelandic and Danish?

Russian and Ukrainian have some genuine mutual intelligibility (although Ukrainian has more with Belarusian), but they have enough differences to make it obvious which is your native language. Learning to speak the other like a native is likely possible, but would take real effort.