As for "not a real country", there's an opinion that I think has some truth to it, that Ukraine, Russia as well as other states were all forged in the flame of USSR. As I visit ex-USSR states they are very similar, like different flavors of the same country. National cloth and parts of language is all that is left.
This way there's not much need to change Ukraine to be like Russia, all of us already have the USSR culture.
Ukraine and it’s predecessor States were separate from any shared territory with Moscow and most of modern Russia’s western territory for something in the neighborhood of 700 years (at least!). There was even a force in Ukraine that fought against Union with Russia (and State Socialism) prior to Ukraine being subjected to Russian domination and eventually the USSR by Russian military force. Ukraine also declared independence from the USSR in 1991. That isn’t nothing either because Russia also went its own separate way and recognized Ukrainian independence. We also had an agreement since 1994 (the Budapest Memorandum) that Russia would respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and that should have been the end of it.
But no, apparently that wasn’t enough and here we are, and for that matter you may as well call me British instead of American because apparently a few centuries of sovereign independence and cultural distinction don’t count.
In my limited experience there's more in common between Russia and Ukraine / Georgia / Kazakhstan than between Russia and Poland / Czech / Croatia etc, latter being Slavs.
USSR did a lot of work to unify culture of its states.
In my personal experience I can never tell if someone is from Ukraine or Belarus until they tell me. I can tell that someone is from EU (including Slavs) just by looking at their back 20 meters away.
And what happened on March 17, 1995?
Here is Putin on the record in a speech he gave:
“ Putin said in a Monday speech: "Ukraine has never had its own authentic statehood. There has never been a sustainable statehood in Ukraine."
He argued that Ukraine was a creation of the Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin, its first leader, despite extensive evidence of a distinctive Ukrainian culture before that.
Putin also made a claim that Ukraine was a part of Russia's historic territory.
He said in his speech: "Let me emphasize once again that Ukraine for us is not just a neighboring country. It is an integral part of our own history, culture, spiritual space.”
Here is the link for additional context including some nice words about having ties to Ukraine not dissimilar to what you just said: https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-denies-reviving-russia...
Maybe there is a cultural dissonance here and what Putin said means something completely different in Russian, but this to me reads as someone walking a fine line trying very hard not to admit that his goal is to erase Ukraine and the Ukrainian people as distinct from Russia and the Russian people. That was in February two days before launching a full scale invasion of Ukraine, and I don’t trust that the “official” reasons are the real ones. Putin is former KGB: deceiving foreigners and citizens alike is literally his bread and butter.