I would disagree with both you and your parent comment. Russian and Ukrainian are East Slavic languages; Polish is a West Slavic language. None of these three

I would disagree with both you and your parent comment. Russian and Ukrainian are East Slavic languages; Polish is a West Slavic language. None of these three languages is mutually intelligible with any other, but Russian and Ukrainian are much closer to each other than other pairings. For example, Polish words generally have a fixed stress position, which makes Polish speech sound foreign and bizarre to unaccustomed Russian/Ukrainian ears. Many features of grammar and syntax are also much more similar between Russian and Ukrainian compared to Polish. This basic picture is clouded a little by the split between east Ukrainian, which is lexically much closer to Russian, and west Ukrainian, which is farther from Russian and has very many lexical borrowings from Polish, because west Ukraine had been a part of Poland for a long time. So someone from the west of Ukraine will hear many familiar words in Polish speech, and will find it easier to understand Polish than someone from the east of Ukraine. That's sort of an icing on a cake, however; it doesn't change the basic fact that Russian is still much closer to their native language. If you could find someone from the west of Ukraine who had never been exposed to anything but their native language (and it's rare, as you mention, because almost everybody knows Russian at least to some extent), they would almost certainly find it much easier to learn Russian than Polish. (my native language is Russian and I grew up in east Ukraine) (and don't get me started on Belorussian)