Ukrainian nationalism is not as popular in the entire country. If you watch their voting behavior you'll notice that
Yuschenko, Timoschenko and the radical nationalists are popular in the regions that belonged to Austrian Poland. This is where the Ukrainian nationalism appeared first.
Uzhgorod is a rather bizarre exception: It belonged to Austrian Hungary and the nationalism supported here was «Rutheanian». It emphasized the connectedness to Russia.
The East and the South of the country did not belong to the medieval Rus state and do not speak the dialects from which the Ukrainian language was formed. This is why they don't support the nationalists.
example: Odessa was founded by Tatars as Yedisan; it mostly spoke Romanian when it was conquered from Turkey by Russia in the late 18th century. Their traditional dialect is a hodgepodge of Turkish, Yiddish, Romanian, Tatar and Greek based on the Standard Russian language. It's nothing like standard Ukrainian. But, naturally, they do not really consider themselves Russian either.
People living in the parts of Ukraine which were added to the Ukrainian SSR by Khruschev, like Crimea, openly consider themselves «Russian» and demand recognition as such (see blue regions on that map).
Curiously enough Ukrainian nationalists do not even recognize the Russians themselves as Russians. They prefer to call them Muscowites instead.
edit: grammar
See this thread
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1w1xwm/is_ukrainian_national_identity_a_modern/
Ukraine has a longer history as an established centralised State than Russia does - the idea that it evolved from Russia is a misnomer, they simply share common roots.
Today's Western Ukraine belonged to Poland and the Austrian Empire for a long time, today's Eastern Ukraine belonged to Russia for centuries. (That's why Western Ukraine has strong Ukrainian identity, speaking Ukrainian, while Eastern Ukraine tends to speak Russian or some dialect in between the two even if they consider themselves Ukrainian, and like Samuel Huntington said in his Clash of Civilizations, the real divide is not between Russia and Ukraine but within Ukraine itself as we can see now. Whether Ukraine will stay one country and manages to form a real nation or not that's open to the future, the US had a civil war, the UK consists of England, Scotland, Wales and NI so that's not impossible)
