The first reason is that they are historically and culturally Russian. The so-called "Ukrainian language" is just a bastardised offshoot of Russian.
Arestovich's comment was prompted by Zelensky's saying in an interview that he "hated Russian" and "didn't like to speak Russian" because Russian was the "language of violence and weapons".
And yet he grew up speaking Russian and still prefers to speak Russian.
The origin of "Ukrainian" is of course, Western Ukraine, primarily around the city of Lemberg (aka "Leopoldstadt") which is now called Lviv in Ukrainian and Lvov in Polish (indeed, the city is much closer to Cracow than it is to Kiev).
This city and the surrounding area was NEVER a part of the Russian empire, and so has always felt more closely allied with the Austrians and the various Germanic confederations that claimed it over centuries (as the original city name would suggest). They are Catholics and not Orthodox. They hate Russia because they were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and other Germanic confederations and were in conflict with the Russian Empire.
This Germanic-Nordic-Aryan origin myth that fills the fevered dreams of the neo-Nazis in that part of Ukraine is what drove them to ally with Hitler in 1941. Their descendants still march in Lviv every year to celebrate the First Galizien Division of the Waffen SS.
It was these ultranationalists that the US allied with to overthrow the Yanukovych government in 2014.
This is, BTW, typical of the US and its covert services. The CIA loves to ally with radical, violent extremist factions like Al Qaeda, ISIS, HTS, PKK, MEK and many others. The Azovs, C14, Kraken, Tornado and Right Sektor are just the latest additions to the list.
Regarding your USA reference, you are right - there is a DIRECT correlation between England and USA and Russia and Ukraine. Just as England and the US have a "special relationship", so have Russians and Ukrainians also had a special relationship, one of so-called "fraternal peoples".
The UkroNazis running the Kiev regime deny this relationship, ad so they have banned Russian as an official language.
And so yes, we Americans speak English. And Ukrainians speak Russian. Imagine outlawing English as a legal language in America.
