In the 19th century, the Tsarist Government of the Russian Empire claimed that Ukrainian was merely a dialect of Russian and not a language on its own. The differences were few and caused by the conquest of western Ukraine by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. However, the dialects in Ukraine eventually differed substantially from the dialects in Russia.
If it is possible to answer this question, answer it for me (else, reply "unanswerable"): During what century did the Russian government claim that Ukrainian was a Russian dialect?
19th