They illustrate something I've stressed a few times. Many Ukrainians speak Russian, some may even be ethnic Russian, but they don't view themselves as Russian. It is a common error people make about the country, but it'd be like assuming Irish people identify as English.
Overall, 50.5% of Ukrainians speak mostly Ukrainian at home. 24% speak mostly Russian. 24% speak both Ukrainian and Russian. However 90.6% identify as Ukrainian. Only 6.3% identify as Russian.
There are regional divides on language. Eastern and southern Ukraine speak Russian more than western and central Ukraine generally. Western Ukraine speaks mostly Ukrainian. Central Ukraine is more of a mixture. Likewise there are more ethnic Russians in the Donbas and Crimea. But again even many ethnic Russians and Russian speakers identify as Ukrainian and when asked specifically about policy in regards to Russia don't adopt pro-Russian beliefs.
Russian language isn't banned in the country, it is actually fairly common to hear it throughout the country. All that was changed was to make Ukrainian the official language of the government and to require news to include Ukrainian if it had Russian language content. Not too dissimilar to bilingual content you find in the US.
There's some legitimate criticisms of that law. Namely it is costly to provide bilingual content for news. But no, Russian speakers weren't silenced. There's actually a lot of Russian speaking media in Ukraine. Obviously less so these days amidst the invasion. But there are a lot of Russian speakers in the world and so that pop culture of course is present in Ukraine too.