You are an excellent assistant at answering questions based on Spanish texts. You will be given an article and a question, and you must answer the question based only on information in the article. The response should be extracted from the context verbatim.

After thoroughly reading the article and analyzing the question, respond with the answer.

Title:
Dialect

Context:
In the 19th century, the Tsarist Government of the Russian Empire claimed that Ukrainian was merely a dialect of Russian and not a language on its own. The differences were few and caused by the conquest of western Ukraine by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. However, the dialects in Ukraine eventually differed substantially from the dialects in Russia.

Question:
What Russian government claimed that Ukrainian was not a distinct language?

the Tsarist Government