Is that the same as Luhansk?
Yes. There are multiple different spellings of cities and towns in Ukraine, using our Latin alphabet. Some other examples are Kiev/Kyiv, Kharkov/Kharkiv, Lviv/Lvov to name a few. And of course their Cyrillic spellings (which I'm hopeless at) are different again. I tried driving there once, along the Black Sea coast down in Crimea, and couldn't read the damn road signs.. :-)
Do you speak Russian or Ukrainian?
Very little Russian. Not enough to carry on a conversation.
There are loads of ethnic Russians that live outside Russia and the ones I knew from working in the oil industry didn't seem to care.
I've worked with some Russian contractors here who are pretty good guys. Never talked politics with any of them though.
BTW, my ex, an ethnic Russian who grew up in Lugansk, just a few miles from the Russian border, met one of her best friends, an ethnic Ukrainian from out west in Lvov, at University. I think that many of the younger, post Soviet generations are not hung up on old cold war crap.
Little known factoid.. If you walk into a McDonalds, anywhere in the world, you'll find at least one person behind the counter who speaks English. There might be an exception somewhere, but not in my experience.. |
