Short answers, pulled from the story.
Russian has over 210 million total speakers worldwide. In 2010 there were 259.8 million speakers, with 137.5 million inside Russia. This makes Russian the most spoken native language in Europe and the most spoken Slavic language.
Russian is an East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, alongside Belarusian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian. It is the native language of the Russian people.
Russian is an official language of the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. It is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations and one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station. It serves as a lingua franca in Ukraine, Moldova, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, classifies Russian as a level III language in learning difficulty for native English speakers. It requires approximately 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency.
The modern literary language was established by the time of Alexander Pushkin in the first third of the 19th century. Pushkin rejected archaic grammar and vocabulary in favor of the spoken language of his time. Earlier, Mikhail Lomonosov authored the first scientific grammar of Russian and, in his Russian Grammar of 1755, defined three stylistic registers.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, several newly independent states encouraged their native languages, partly reversing the privileged status of Russian. In Ukraine, support for making Russian a state language fell to just 7% after the 2022 invasion. Researcher A. L. Arefyev documented a weakening trend, with Russian's share of world population falling to 3.3% by 2020.
The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters written in the Cyrillic script, adapted from Old Church Slavonic. The first attempt at reforming Russian orthography was carried out in 1708 to 1710, and the last major reform came in 1917 to 1918.