In my opinion, the Ukrainian language has always been an important marker of Ukrainian identity. The significance of the Ukrainian language after 1991 is constantly increasing. I can see now in Kyiv more and more young people, especially students, speak Ukrainian. More and more popular movies are making in Ukraine. Our state was under imperial protectorship much longer than Poland. During the period of Ukrainian history, while our state was the part of the USSR, the attitudes of the Soviet ideology towards the Ukrainian language varied from encouragement and tolerance to discouragement. So many Ukrainians in the USSR were learning Russian for achieving a position in the soviet bureaucratic system. Children were being bred in the Russian language and cultural environment. For example, my parents (native Ukrainians) and grandparents were speaking Russian at home. In my childhood, most of my friends in Kyiv were speaking Russian. The Ukrainian language was considered as not fashionable. This was caused by tricky Moscow politics of governing the peoples of the USSR. So Moscow has done many efforts for destroying the Ukrainian identity. In my opinion many people in Ukraine just idle (lazy) about attempts of changing consciously their communication language from Russian to Ukrainian. I like to recommend the interview of Alexey Arestovych https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub5S2a6d24A At 9:32 of the video he says about Ukrainians as a nation of conformists, at 12:05 that Ukrainians can be divided by two parts: 25% of Cossacks and 73% of peasants. Speaking about geo-political reasons many people in Ukraine are still under enormous information and cultural influence of Russia. That is why the percentage of people in Ukraine who speaking Russian is high.