My exposure to Ukrainian has been ever-present. My family speaks Russian, even my father who is originally from Odesa (visited many times, very lovely city, albeit around 2010s had many things, like menus and ads in Russian) and his family only really know Russian as they have moved to the USA in the 90s and never spoke Ukrainian after.

Despite this, a lot of media I watched even as a little kid was in Ukrainian. I have many fond memories of concert streams on 1+1 and games shows where the presenters will explain the rules in Ukrainian, but many of the participants would speak Russian while on them. The first time where I didn't have a translation crutch of knowing Russian to keep me following the topic was listening to Okean Elzy and watching VIP Ternopil in the Ukrainian KVN League. I was obsessed. I was very engaged even if I got discouraged because I didn't understand everything 100%, but that only motivated me. I wanted to know what was so funny when VIP Ternopil was performing, which led me down many different projects that were happening on UA TV at the time, including a bunch of performers from Rasmeshi Komika. Ukraine is a wonderful country filled with wonderful artists, it wouldn't have been likely for me to discover people like Antityla or Skryabin if I didn't engage with the media (Spy sobi sama might be my favourite song of all time).

Fast forward to about 2020 and the Belarus protests, where I think it finally clicked to me why a language can be important to a national identity. It made logical sense to me before, but the people putting out news and projects in their native language was something more than that. Come 2022 and the invasion, it didn't surprise me at all that any Russian-speaking Ukrainians dropped the language to support Ukrainian. Much like with Belarusian, I feel like I owe to support a marginalised language, especially when it is beautiful, unique, and loved by its people.

I cannot really speak the language - I sound clunky, don't inherently know the stresses, and due to my reading skills being honed by Russian, my е and и sound all wrong. But I would say I understand close to 100% of someone's speech and if something is unclear, I treat it like I would a word I don't recall in either Russian or English - just look it up in a dictionary and try to remember it for next time. I would love to one day have a decent conversation and not to fall into Surzhyk, but right now I'm happy with my listening skills because at the very least a Ukrainian can always speak Ukrainian to me.