Ukraine’s security service blew up a railway connection linking Russia to China, in a clandestine strike carried out deep into enemy territory, with pro-Kremlin media reporting that investigators have opened a criminal case into a “terrorist attack.”
The SBU set off several explosions inside the Severomuysky tunnel of the Baikal-Amur highway in Buryatia, located some 6,000 kilometers east of Ukraine, a senior Ukrainian official with direct knowledge of the operation told POLITICO.
“This is the only serious railway connection between the Russian Federation and China. And currently, this route, which Russia uses, including for military supplies, is paralyzed,” the official said.
Four explosive devices went off while a cargo train was moving inside the tunnel. “Now the (Russian) Federal Security Service is working on the spot, the railway workers are unsuccessfully trying to minimize the consequences of the SBU special operation,” the Ukrainian official added.
Ukraine’s security service has not publicly confirmed the attack. Russia has also so far not confirmed the sabotage.
Can anyone explain how different the languages are? Super different or “they kind of get eachother, just are noticably different”
They have similar alphabets, grammar and a lot of cognates. If you only spoke one you’d be able to recognize most of a sentence with these things, but sometimes words are totally different. They probably sound similar to someone unfamiliar with both, but they are quite distinct.
So like Spanish and Italian or closer?
It appears, lexically they are closer than Spanish and Italian, close to like Italian and Romanian, but a bit further. There are many ways to measure language distance though, so this is just a vague analogy
I thought they were mutually intelligible?
Similar enough for mutual intelligibility but different enough that Russian only speakers will probably run into a shiboleth
No need for people to even speak different languages to run into shibboleth, the pronunciation of Russian is very different in different regions, the Ukrainian is not homogeneous either.
Like Spanish from Mexico and Spanish from Spain?
Somebody once said to me that it’s rather like the difference between English and Dutch.
If you ever hear Dutch it rather sounds like English and you’ve just not quite heard them correctly. If you were in another room and just heard the ebb and flow of the language you’d probably not be able to tell the difference, but in person directly you can.
And as a non-speaker of both languages they sound basically the same to me so I think it is true
I’d say, Ukrainian have more brutal (deep throat) sounding than russian, but maybe it’s only local thing with Ukrainian guys i was talking with. So, usually it’s like 14 years old kid in Ukraine sounds like grown up Russian dude
There is a lexical tree that gives some insight. Lexicostatistical distance would have worked better, I think, but I cant seem to find the numbers for that kind of metric.
Here I’ve edited an excerpt from the table, that shows how far Russian and Ukrainian are and how that compares to some other European languages