Why is this dumb thread still be posted in?
The Ukrainians have their own language because they have their own history and their own national interests and their own need for a vehicle to express these things and many other things that are distinct on some level from the same aspects of surrounding cultures. There are phonetic, syntactic, lexical, and other differences between Ukrainian and standard Russian, but as a disinterested linguist the only thing I can go by is mutual intelligibility. I would not be surprised if the newer generation of Ukrainians, or at least some of them, professed to not be able to understand Russian. After all, they would not have had it shoved down their throats as their parents and grandparents did in the Soviet times. Why is this such a problem?
The idea that they should be considered the same language may have some traction, but it also may be subordinated to political or other social concerns. If a person from Montenegro can speak "Montenegrin" (but only since October 2007), and an Afghan and a Persian can embrace their different language standards (Dari/Afghan Persian for the Afghan, and Farsi for the Persian), then surely a Russian chauvinist can let Ukrainians have their own language even if he thinks it's just funny sounding Russian. I wouldn't even deny the OP the right to continue to think that, of course -- in fact, that's what it sounds like to me (sorry, Ukrainians). The difference between Vladik and me, however, is that I recognize that this is because I learned Russian before being exposed to Ukrainian, so of course I'd think that. That doesn't really make Ukrainian some kind of perverted Russian, though. If anything, that's a testament to the political and social domination of the Russian people within that sphere of influence and how it impacts language learning (there are probably many times more Russian language and Russian history programs in American universities than there are Ukrainian ones, and those Russian programs are likely to treat Ukrainians and Belarusians as an afterthought). So to decry political influences in language taxonomies rings a little hollow when you, a proud Russian speaker, benefit from those same political influences. Did you ever stop to think how it would be if the capital of the empire had stayed at Kiev and the Muscovites were the ones speaking all that funny talk?
There is absolutely no advantage of having Ukrainian declared a "Russian dialect", by the way. Even if you had the power to do so, it would do nothing but tick off a bunch of people who have already rejected your cultural and linguistic dominance. The nationalistic feelings that give birth to such distinctions (or, rather, that exploit preexisting distinctions in speech forms) exist before the standardization schemes that create an "official language" in the first place. To say that "x people speak this language" you have to recognize x people as a legitimate socio-cultural unit in the first place, and for most of the world that process is legitimized through having their own language. Or don't you remember the Moldavian/Romanian distinction that your internationalist heroes the Soviets did nothing to discourage. Apparently they, like the Ukrainians, were legitimate enough to be divided into a constituent republic, so what's the problem? Now that they are their own state, they can't name their language whatever they want? That's essentially the position you're putting the Ukrainians in vis-a-vis Russian, Vladik...but something tells me you don't care so much about that parallel situation since it has zero impact on Russian cultural chauvinism, which is what this thread is really about (and almost a textbook example of).