Okay, okay, so? The point is, there's a hell of a lot of songs, books, science articles, movies, video games and other kinds of content in Russian now. It's standardized, everybody can read, speak and write it. Things are going around Russian language. It's an UN and UNESCO language. A lot of goodies.
So it makes sense that everyone who is fluent in both Ukrainian and Russian will be consuming Russian content 90% of time. Hence people no longer use Surzhik anywhere east of Kharkov (or Khabarovsk), even if some of their ancestors actually spoke it. It just don't make sense to do that anymore.
It does not help that literature Ukrainian has a lot of borrowings from Polish, Romanian and Hungarian and is not really accessible to people who did not visit Ukrainian state schools. However, Russian is very accessible to basically everybody in Ukraine and the rest of ex-USSR.
Regarding folk songs, people actually did a lot of digging in this area starting with late Soviet times, and now there's huge revival of folk music in Russia. Many contemporary pop or rock bands use Russian (Slavic, maybe even Ukrainian) folk motives in their songs, which are usually in Russian. By doing so, they enrich Russian culture, which I've started this comment from.
Ukrainian language with 1000+ years of history, is not a dialect of Russian (Russish) language, which is a very recent development, with so high number of words borrowed from Turk languages, that it makes hard for Russians to understand other Slavic languages, except Bulgarians, which are also have some Tatar origin.
Use of Russian language shrunk by 2x in last 30 years, while Ukrainian language increased by 2x in last 30 years. At some point, it will flip.
Regarding folk songs, just name one Russian folk song in Russian language, for which I will not be able to found author by 5 minutes of googling.
I'm not sure why I will be doing all that. A great Ukrainian folk song Zhuravel' was rediscovered by Chstyakov I believe, and is now fertilizing the Russian culture.
So it makes sense that everyone who is fluent in both Ukrainian and Russian will be consuming Russian content 90% of time. Hence people no longer use Surzhik anywhere east of Kharkov (or Khabarovsk), even if some of their ancestors actually spoke it. It just don't make sense to do that anymore.
It does not help that literature Ukrainian has a lot of borrowings from Polish, Romanian and Hungarian and is not really accessible to people who did not visit Ukrainian state schools. However, Russian is very accessible to basically everybody in Ukraine and the rest of ex-USSR.
Regarding folk songs, people actually did a lot of digging in this area starting with late Soviet times, and now there's huge revival of folk music in Russia. Many contemporary pop or rock bands use Russian (Slavic, maybe even Ukrainian) folk motives in their songs, which are usually in Russian. By doing so, they enrich Russian culture, which I've started this comment from.