As Russian forces menace the Ukrainian capital and thousands flee, the very least onlookers around the world can do is learn how to say the name of the city under siege. The short answer is simple "So Russian speakers who want to suggest that Ukraine is part of Russia will put the stress on the "a" in the Russian word украинский (Ukrainskiy), which makes it sound more like a Ukrainian has a Cyrillic alphabet almost identical to some other Slavonic languages (Russian, Bulgarian). Some of its letters look exactly like those of the Latin alphabet used in English; however, most of these are pronounced differently than in English and may in fact resemble other English sounds. A thousand years ago, Ukrainian and Russian would have been largely similar, sounding like different dialects of the same language. However over time, Ukraine merged with the It has retained the two early Cyrillic letters і (i) and izhe (и) to represent related sounds /i/ and /ɪ/ as well as the two historical forms e (е) and ye (є). Its unique letters are the following: ge (ґ), used for the less-common velar plosive /ɡ/ sound, whereas in Ukrainian the common Cyrillic г represents a glottal fricative, /ɦ/. As a result, at the next London mayoral election in 2024 the system will be switched to what's known as the First Past The Post voting system (FPTP) which is the same as the method used in general Ukrainians pronounce their capital city, Kyiv, using sounds that don't quite exist in English. But it's closer to "Keev" than to "Key-ev ," which is more of a Russian pronunciation. The Ukrainian language, even for those who can't understand it, sounds like a song. Part of this has to do with the fact that our language is rich in vowels. This makes Ukrainian a very melodious language. Why We Wrote This. Though the Ukrainian and Russian languages are closely related, the sociopolitical divide between their speakers couldn't be wider in Ukraine, due to the prejudices and values Ukrainian is the official language of the Ukraine. Home speakers can be found in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Poland, the Czech Republic jUaE.