As part of my University course i have to pick a language unit and i was stoked to see Russian listed, however when i tried to choose it they said it wasn't available this year . However the only Slavic language they have to offer this year is Ukrainian.

This somewhat disappoint's me, since i've read that the majority of people in Ukraine speak Russian. Furthermore i'm beginning to think learning this language would be useless (no offense to the Ukrainians) since no other place speaks the language.

I'd like to know if Ukrainian is similar to Russian and if i did learn Ukrainian would it be easy for me to learn Russian? How different is the language and would Russians understand Ukrainian speech? And would I be able to understand Russians?

These are the other languages to choose from:

Chinese ; Classical (Greek, Latin); French ; German; Indonesian; Italian; Japanese; Korean ; Spanish

Thanks