Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Ostromir Gospels were written in 1056 and stand as one of the oldest East Slavic books known today. This manuscript preserves a form of language that would eventually evolve into modern Russian.
In 2010 there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world according to census data. Russia itself contained 137.5 million speakers while the CIS and Baltic countries held 93.7 million.
The first attempt at reforming Russian orthography occurred between 1708 and 1710 while the last major reform took place during 1917 and 1918. These changes standardized the Cyrillic alphabet which consists of exactly 33 letters.
A new education law passed on the 5th of September 2017 requiring all schools to teach at least partially in Ukrainian. The 2019 Law of Ukraine On protecting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language gives priority to Ukrainian in over 30 spheres of public life.
Russian holds status as one of six official languages of the United Nations and appears in organizations like UNESCO and the World Health Organization. It also serves as one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station alongside English.