[Mediterraneo10]

Russians often claim that Ukrainian is totally mutually intelligible, but it is easy to find counterexamples. There are Taras Shevchenko poems, for example, that if you present them to the average Russian speaker, that Russian speaker would have to guess at the meaning of a large number of words (and would guess wrong). All of the Slavic languages have retained common features and two speakers of different Slavic languages can often drop to a sort of basic shared level to communicate, but the innovations in each language – especially with the rise of complex standard languages – should not be underestimated.

Even within Ukraine, Ukrainians from Kyiv can face some difficulties understanding the Ukrainian spoken in the Carpathians (which is either transitional to Rusyn or is actually straight-up Rusyn), or the rural dialect of Trans-Carpathia that can include a great deal of Hungarian words.