You're right they aren't closely related, Romanian is Romance and Russian is Slavic but both of those families come under Indo-European as thread said. Also SpartanLlama didn't say they were related, just that there are similarities, which there are, not least because they have influenced each other, being close to each other and Romania having been a Russian satellite state.
Israel isn't random at all if you know the history behind it. Tons of Jewish people fled persecution in Russia and the USSR before, during, and after WW2, or made Aaliyah after the creation of the Israeli state. Ben-Gurion himself was born in the part of Poland then controlled by the Russian Empire. (though his first language was probably Yiddish)
yw! Always happy to elucidate. Jewish persecution in the Russian empire was terrible. "Pogrom" is a Russian word- that should tell you something. A lot of people don't know about that. On the other hand, if the Nazis weren't even worse than the Russians were, then there may today be as many or more German, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, or Yiddish-speaking Israelis as Russian-speaking ones. Horrible persecution still not quite as bad as wholesale industrial-scale genocide. And the former often leads to large population displacements while the latter just leads to... less population.
On a (third?) hand... if Europeans countries had been nicer to Jewish people then there might not even be an Israel, or it might be smaller in area and population, or it might be majority Sephardic or at any rate not so full of recent immigrants and their descendants. You can play the "what if?" game forever.
I think Uzbekistan is an omission. On wikipedia, it states that there are about one million native russian speakers there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Uzbekistan
On the page wikipedia page linked under the title, it has Uzbekistan with 650,000 Russian speakers. Tajikistan is also there, they are both listed much further down the page because the "native" status of the Russian speakers is unclear.
Georgia is missing too. In the larger cities of Uzbekistan I was always greeted in Russian first, everyone I spoke to could speak Russian.
These Wikipedia articles are woefully inaccurate. Apparently Italy has a higher percent of total English speakers then South Africa. But when on the ground it's hard to find a South African that doesn't speak english, while in Italy it's hard to find someone who speaks englsh.
My suggestion is that the quiz would be improved by including the missing ex-USSR nations where the "native" status of Russian speakers is potentially unclear as pre-filled "grey" answers.
I have the strong impression that the source mixes numbers about native Russian speakers for some countries, and just any Russian speakers for other countries. I highly doubt there are two and half million native Russian speakers in Germany. That would make them by far the second largest minority after the Turks. And they are not. But if the number for Germany includes second language speakers, then it is surprising there isn't any other Eastern European country without a large Russian minority on the list (for instance, Poland).
Most of them are descendants of germans wo emigrated to russia in the 18th and early 19th century.
In the 20th century, especially after the russian revolution and even more after WW2, they faced hostility and presecution in Russia, not unalike what jewish russians experienced that time.
So most of the people with german ancestors left Russia and most of them came to Germany, that offered a lot of practical and financial help for the "Spätaussiedler".
This was - and still is - not without problems, but it seems that the russians do much better in the matter of integration than many other emigrants, they don't look very different and cultural differences are also smaller compared to emigrants from the Arabic world or Africa.
Nevertheless, although statistics say there are about 2.5 million people with russian ancestors in Germany, I doubt that all of them can be counted as native russian speakers.
The number for Finland seemed kinda large as I was under the impression of Finland having ~50k Russian speakers. But now that I checked the national statistics service, the number 77 177 presented here is actually the number from December 2017, and it has since increased. In the end of 2020 it was 84 190 which corresponds to 1,50% of Finnish population. Even more than I expected
more than 3,5 million i think. though some of them are 'german russians' which means germans that went to russia decades or hundreds of years ago but were able to keep lots of their german culture but also adapted to the russian one.. now they came back and them and russian jews are both included in the 3,5 million together with the regular russians.
Its because wealthy russians seek sunny places for their holidays/retirement and many stay afterwards, especially at the South coast. Like Marbella. And the go to Spain because its sunny but much cheaper than France
Poland should be here 100%. There is about 1,5million Ukrainians in Poland, and a great share of them speak Russian, so it is definitely more than 500k Russian speakers.
Bro i just went for the craziest path to guess spain, I was stuck on it and it was the last country i hade to fill in. instead of thinking of likely countries, I made the math using the percentage and number of speakers, and I found out that the country would have a little less than 50 million people, so i guessed spain and got surprised because it was right
On a (third?) hand... if Europeans countries had been nicer to Jewish people then there might not even be an Israel, or it might be smaller in area and population, or it might be majority Sephardic or at any rate not so full of recent immigrants and their descendants. You can play the "what if?" game forever.
These Wikipedia articles are woefully inaccurate. Apparently Italy has a higher percent of total English speakers then South Africa. But when on the ground it's hard to find a South African that doesn't speak english, while in Italy it's hard to find someone who speaks englsh.
What comes to Italy, it's the new France (if you know what I mean).
Most of them are descendants of germans wo emigrated to russia in the 18th and early 19th century.
In the 20th century, especially after the russian revolution and even more after WW2, they faced hostility and presecution in Russia, not unalike what jewish russians experienced that time.
So most of the people with german ancestors left Russia and most of them came to Germany, that offered a lot of practical and financial help for the "Spätaussiedler".
This was - and still is - not without problems, but it seems that the russians do much better in the matter of integration than many other emigrants, they don't look very different and cultural differences are also smaller compared to emigrants from the Arabic world or Africa.
Nevertheless, although statistics say there are about 2.5 million people with russian ancestors in Germany, I doubt that all of them can be counted as native russian speakers.