Who ultimately cut off the South Slavs?

[Varda]

no, if we speak about Russian language then 25% of vocabulary only

What about Serbian?

[Arūnas]

What about Serbian?

I understand much more of "Yugoslavic" language the finno-ugric/VUR-Slavic is more difficult in fact

[Jana]

no, if we speak about Russian language then 25% of vocabulary only

East Slavic includes Ukrainian, Ruthenian and Belarussian.

[Nurzat]

East Slavic includes Ukrainian, Ruthenian and Belarussian.

it's dialects only - speaking Ukrainian and Romanian I can notice how Moldovan dialect of Romanian is more grammatically and lexically deviant/different to standard Romanian than any of these speeches are between themselves. of course I would keep all local variants and give them local power, but I wouldn't call it different languages or derive different nationalities from it. Russic peoples belong together imo, at least culturally (they can keep the borders if they wish, but should stay culturally homogeneous)

[vbnetkhio]

These maps of East Slavic settlements dated between IX and XIII centuries clearly show why a Slavic continuum never was with Balkan Slavs. In today Moldova all early medieval East Slavic settlements were found along the Dniester river (some along Răut river), vast majority of them being destroyed or abandoned already in XIth century based of archeological data. The reason is continous waves of Steppe nomads from Central Asia, plus Slavs were forest people, not steppe like turkic nomads, the border between them was a natural transition from densily forest area to totally steppe area. As Peterski/Tomenable said, entire southern and eastern Steppe parts of Ukraine were heavily colonised in the past 300 years. The only areas East Slavs tried to colonised in early Medieval times in more southern regions were along rivers, especially big navigable ones, Dniester is one of them, but only for a very short time.

what about Ipotesti-Candesti and Penkovka? They were Slavs and they were present in all of today's Moldavia/Moldova if I'm not mistaken. But I suppose they were replaced by Turkic peoples at some point?

[Mortimer]

I wonder about pan slavism and slavic nationalism and how they became a distinct identity and even opposed to the germans italians greeks Albanians and rest of the Europeans why they are slavs and not just europeans I don't believe a Czech is closer to the Russian or Serbs than to the austrians or hungarians neither are Serbs closer to the poles then to albanians I wonder why they are slavs

[Aspirin]

what about Ipotesti-Candesti and Penkovka? They were Slavs and they were present in all of today's Moldavia/Moldova if I'm not mistaken. But I suppose they were replaced by Turkic peoples at some point?

These are Early Slavic cultures extincted already in VIIth century. Ipotești-Cîndești in general seems to had and some influence of late-Roman period based on found ceramics, it show a mix of early Slavic elements with something local. Exist and tribes like Antes who lived here, which again show some non-specific for early Slavs cultural elements, some even tried to link them to Balts, but this don't make any sense. Later, especially near Dniester river, between 8-10 centuries, lived tribes of Uliches and Tivertsi, these were proper East Slavic tribes with typical for Eastern Slavs settlements, and all these settlements of the map along Dniester are linked to them since they were founded around IXth century.