Original statements that led to this discussion

>>Polish is the second most-used Slavic language, right after Russian and just before Ukrainian

>This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it.

The language debate about whether Ukraine is third behind Russian and Polish does not get heated till somebody here proposes a Slavic language that would have more speakers than Ukrainian does.

Here you go, stats, you see that Ukraine has a 7m larger population than Poland, but it's already conceded that not everybody there speaks Ukrainian, putting Ukrainian into 3rd place. Are you claiming that 36 million Ukrainians speak Russian and not Ukrainian which would put Czechia in 3rd place with 10 million speakers?

Put up or shut up.

  Russia        143,500,000
  Ukraine        45,490,000
  Poland         38,530,000
  Czechia        10,200,000
  Belarus         9,498,700
  Bulgaria        7,265,000
  Serbia          7,164,000
  Slovakia        5,414,000
  Croatia         4,253,000
  Bosnia and      3,829,000
    Herzegovina
  Slovenia        2,060,000
  Montenegro        621,383

The people here ranting about how heated the topic is seem to be the people who want the topic to be heated, I'm thinking Putin knob polishers.

What Slavic languages are spoken by more people than Ukrainian?

Wikipedia says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine (with a dozen other languages under 1% each) top two:

  Ukrainian  32,577,468  67.53%
  Russian  14,273,670  29.59%

wikipedia also says as of 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language

  32   million Ukrainian as 1st language
   6.9 million Ukrainian as 2nd language

you see? nobody is heated up. And soon, the remaining Russian speakers will be able to learn Ukrainian in school making the problem go away completely.