Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ukrainian is an East Slavic language descended from Old East Slavic, the language of the medieval state of Kievan Rus. It is most closely related to Belarusian and has more mutual intelligibility with Belarusian than with Russian, despite frequent comparisons to Russian.
Ukrainian was banned as a subject and language of instruction in Russian Imperial schools in 1804. Further suppression followed in 1847, and Alexander II issued his secret Ems Ukaz banning most Ukrainian-language publications, public performances, and lectures. A strict ban was renewed again in 1914.
The earliest known Ukrainian published book to survive is Ivan Kotlyarevsky's epic poem Eneyida, published in 1798. Kotlyarevsky was a playwright from Poltava in southeastern Ukraine, and he wrote the work as a burlesque retelling of Virgil's Aeneid in vernacular Ukrainian, partly using satire to avoid censorship.
The 1897 Russian Empire Census recorded over 22 million Ukrainian speakers, making Ukrainian the second most spoken language in the entire empire. In rural Ukrainian provinces, roughly 80 percent of inhabitants named Ukrainian as their native tongue, but in cities only 32.5 percent did.
A unified Ukrainian alphabet was established at a 1927 international Orthographic Conference in Kharkiv. In 1933, a Soviet spelling commission branded the 1928 orthography as nationalist and produced a revised version designed to bring Ukrainian closer to Russian. The distinctive letter for the "ge" sound was removed from the alphabet entirely and was not restored until the period of Glasnost in 1990.
Unlike Russian, Ukrainian has preserved the Common Slavic vocative case and retains features such as the first-person plural verb ending "-mo." Uniquely among all Slavic languages, Ukrainian has also developed a synthetic inflectional future tense through the erosion of the verb meaning "to have" or "to take," producing forms like "pysat-ymu" for "I will write."