Good point! Great difference.

THIS MOVIE IS JUST CRAP!
I would not say so harshly. IMHO it is a fairy-tale for Americans

"Ukrainians" are a special case since over 70% or even 80% of "Ukrainians" speak Russian at home. There was a study, people in Ukraine were polled on some random subject and 86% chose the polling paper in Russian language (that was the goal actually to see in which language they will answer the poll).
Also there are 3 Ukrainian languages. Western Ukrainian, Surzhik and modern Ukrainian. Western Ukrainian developed naturally since people there lived under Poland for 700 years. Surzhik is an Ukrainian dialect of the Russian language. Modern Ukrainian was artificially developed by communists. The base of it was Surzhik. They took all Russian words and modified them (one of the changes was replacing o with i - Ukraine born Mikhail Bulgakov even makes fun of it in his novel "The White Guard". How is kot (cat) in Ukrainian? Kit (whale)! Then how is kit? You cannot meet kits in Ukraine!) or replaced with modified Polish words. At the same time grammar stayed extremely close to the Russian one. So all these decades they were trying to instill this artificial language that started developing only in 20th century. Those Ukrainians in your story were probably from Western Ukraine. Actually even the rest of people of Ukraine sometimes struggle to understand them.
Since day one of foundation of every large city in Ukraine (back then there was not even such word as Ukraine) people in those cities spoke Russian. In villages people spoke Surzhik. They moved to cities and could easily pick up the most popular language in the area since Surzhik was truly close to the Russian.
On Ukrainian television mainly hosts speak Ukrainian (not always, Savik Shuster speaks Russian and that's one of the most popular political shows in Ukraine, same with Yevgeny Kiselyov) and officials also try to stick to Ukrainian. But off cameras even biggest politicians interact in Russian. In news shows people on streets might get asked a question in Ukrainian but in 80% cases get an answer in Russian.

Complete and utter beep Bulgarians and Jugoslavians used to be taught Russian in school until 1989 or so and that's why your grandfather could communicate with the older Bulgarians/Jugoslavians!
To say Bulgarian is nothing like Russian would be an overstatement, but they aren't similar enough for a Russian to understand Bulgarian or even Serbo-Croatian.
Talking out of your ass like that shut everyone up until now, but please provide some proof for your claims if you go on with this story.
EDIT: I'd like to add, not even Ukranians who don't speak Russians can speak to them. I know 4 Ukranians and a lot of Russians and have seen them interact. They understand a few words, but that's about it. Ukranian is a hell of a lot closer to Russian than Serbo-Croatian (the mother of my children is Bosnian btw, so again this is not unfamiliar territory).
THIS MOVIE IS JUST CRAP!

They could. My grand-father was a Russian migr who had no problem talking with Bulgarians and Serbs and understanding each other. The Slavic languages of the Byzantine sphere are very close, rooted in the Cyrillic Bible.
The Western/Latin Slavs (Polish, Czechs, Croatians, Slovens, etc.) have been more influenced by Latin and German.
You could compare Russian and Bulgarian to Spanish and Portuguese for example, or French, Catalan and Romanian.

Bulgarian and Russian are pretty close.
If you know one, you'll understand much of the other.
Your feeble skills are no match for the power of kittens.

elly_l is correct. We can assume that Viktor in the film is at least in his 40's. Most people that come from Bulgaria (Krakozhia as they made it out to be in the film) learned mandatory Russian in school from a very early age when Bulgaria was still a People's Republic (Communist) during the Iron Curtain. In fact, it was like this everywhere in Eastern Europe where communism prevailed at the time. So a man Viktor's age hailing from Bulgaria would probably be able to understand Russian, although the Russian man would not have understood Bulgarian, which was what Viktor spoke to him. The two languages are Slavic and share similarities, and perhaps the Russian man deduced what Viktor was trying to ask him. I'm a younger generation Bulgarian and never learned Russian, but I can pick up enough words here and there to maybe understand the gist of a sentence or conversation. So the conversation they had is plausible.

truth is: bulgarian can understand russian (espessially older generations, who had studied at school), but can not speak right. Thing is most of the bulgarians say they speak "Perfect" russian , because they think the two languages are so similar, that just changing the general sound and adding "-aya", "-oy" or -"chik" at the end of any bulgarian word makes the word russian.
On the other hand, russians don't bother trying to understand or speak bulgarian, because they know there always be some bulgarian who will understand them and communicate with them on good enough level of skills, because he/she has studied russian at school as a part of the programme.
But, yes, if two intuitive enough people meet, one bulgarian, one russian, chances are they would understand each other well. after all, the structure of speech and most of the words are pretty similar. (although the bulgarian word "maika" (mother) means "tank top" in russian, and the bulgarian "jivot" (life) means "abdomen" in russian, but those are more of an exeption to the rule and subject of humor)
I think same situation can be achieved by using swedish/norwegian people, or spanish/portuguese, or checz/polish.

So. I'm Russian. I watched the movie dubbed at first and thought this scene was unrealistic but now I'm watching the original and I can say this scene is actually very well done :))) Bulgarian and Russian are, indeed, only partially intelligible between the speakers of the languages but it was really enough in that particular situation. Navorski and Milodragovic didn't understand every single word of what the other one was saying, but they still got the message across so they could understand each other in general and Navorski was able to translate because it was simple enough. It would have been the same if any other Russian and any Bulgarian had this conversation and made an effort to understand each other. They got it right during the rehearsals.
I'm not the only one, though, who didn't understand Milodragovic, indeed played by a Russian actor, in the dubbed version but it's the dubbing company's fault because the sound of the dubbed lines was - and usually is - very different from the sound in the movie as a whole and it's hard to switch. Also, Milodragovic is not a Russian surname, it looks Serbian to me, but that's a small detail. A Russian can have a Serbian surname, after all

Well, in the movie it is said that Krakhosia is bordering Russia, and Maldrogovich (sp? -the russian guy) lived close to the border.
It's like this.. Danish people understand swedish, for the most part, but it is two seperate countries. Even norwegian is rather easily read and understood.
So even if they're two seperate countries, the languages will have an effect on one another when they're that close.
Thinking about my previous example.. I actually understand swedish better than some danish dialects, haha. Oh yeah, I'm danish.

Both languages are similar and their alphabets are almost identical, but yet there are differences between Bulgarian and Russian language.

Thanks for mentioning it. Knowledge can't be forced through a funnel into one's brain. This "forcing" argument is such a poor excuse for people's ignorance.

Bulgarian children were forced to learn Russian
Almost in every EU country (or anywhere in world) the children learn English, nobody asks them if they want or not.
Will you say that they are forced to learn English?

your friend was either very pretentious or was bulshtting you.
Daskalov is a male surname; Daskalova is a female surname; It's similar in all slavic languages. It was at some time during the 70s, 80s, modern to use russian names, but since both languages are very similar, names like Sergey and Jury are not concidered as foreign to bulgarians as are Ryan and Vanessa ( also modern names, but during 2000s). It's just that government was kissing russian as back then and is kissing american as* nowadays.
usually women from Bulgaria who lived abroad during the 80 and 90s changed their surname from female to male, sometimes adding "off" at the end. Maybe they wanted to "blend in" and not sound so "slavic", maybe they wanted to avoid confusion, but there never was time in Bulgaria when someone changed their surname, espessially from male to female! because of "russian occupation", for 2 reasons: 1) there never was russian ocupation, only political kissing of soviet as*. 2) it's the same way names are formed both in bulgarian and in russian, as well as a number of other languages, so you can't really russianize your name.

Until the end of the cold war, Bulgaria was, for all practical purposes, occupied by the Soviet Union. Bulgarian children were forced to learn Russian and even had their names Russianized. Or so I was told by a Bulgarian au pair named Daskalov who had been able to change it back from Daskalova once the Russians left Bulgaria. So it's not surprising that the Hanks character was bilingual.

They are similar languages (my Bulgarian friend could make out words in Russian and Polish), but actually most Eastern Europeans can speak Russian as well as their native language.

Americans think everybody in the Eastern Europe speaks roughly the same language, be it Russian, Bulgarian, Polish or Albanian. They all are unintelligible, so they must be the same, right?

Most of the Bulgarian people speak russian (we learn it at scool), but in the movie he was speaking bulgarian and the other guy was speaking russian. Yes they are similar languages and it is posible for a bulgarian and a russian people to understand eachother.

Yeah jlprizm21, it's pretty clear that you understood the Bulgarian speech since the so called Macedonian language is actually a Bulgarian dialect, but that's a different story.
Нали така приятелю?

I'm from Macedonia and I speak Macedonian and it's really close to Bulgaria so I could pretty much understand what Victor was saying. But that's what I was wondering too. I know some of their words are similar to ours but I really don't think that he could understand him let alone translate. My friend is Russian and although alot of the words we use are similar we could definitely not talk to each other or translate what we're saying. But maybe he knew more Russian than me. haha.
I love the Internet.

i speak neither Bulgarian or Russian
i speak very poor Polish AND I COULD MAKE OUT what he was saying

maria as in your case I speak spanish and can understand most things in a conversation of Italian and portuguese. Pretty similar languages.

Although Hanks worked with Bulgarian as his root language, the language he was supposed to be speaking in the film was "Kracozhian," so your question is moot. We can assume whatever we want about the linguistic similarities between Russian and "Kracozhian."

The similarity between Bulgarian and Russian languages is based on the Cyrillic alphabet with certain exceptions for a couple of letters. The difference is in the grammar and pronunciation. Though, people from the two nations could generally understand themselves in a conversation, it takes a deeper knowledge until one can claim they know a foreign language.