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.
What Russian government claimed that Ukrainian was not a distinct language?
{'text': 'the Tsarist Government', 'answer_start': 21}