That is not correct. Prominent example - the Shuiskys, rulers of Suzdal in the 17th century.
You miss the simple fact that there was no Ukraine several hundreds of years ago and the White Russia was just a regional name for one of many similar like the Black or Red Russia. Of curse there are some regional naming traditions, but in general all what is now Russia, Belorussia, Lithuania, Ukraine and even more were coglomerates of feudal territories ruled by different rulers, populated mostly by slavic peoples. And whether ukranian neo-nazi jerks today like or not back in the day those people mostly divided themselves into Russians, Lithuanians and Poles basically(as you adequately put it religion was more important than ethnicity). The names that are often considered ukrainian today were also perfectly common for Russians.
It is wrong to consider those names to be of ukrainian decent, just like the "russian" names with -ov -ev in the Ukraine don't necessarily indicate russian decent. There are perfectly ukrainian Ukranians with those names. Those names came into being in one big area at a time when there wasn't a dividing into Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians.
So the -ski or -skiy can be of perfectly russian decent and without any connecton to a narrow case you refered to.
The Shuiskys, like much of the Russian elite of the 14th-15th centuries, copied the Polish practice of adopting a surname based on their main holding or title, including the '-sky' suffix. A few later princely families, particularly those of Georgian patronage (i.e. Gruzinskys), followed that example and also adopted names ending in '-sky.' These were, however, the exceptions and not the rule. The overwhelming majority of the Russian nobility used surnames with Russian suffixes like '-ov' (i.e. Romanov) or '-in' (i.e. Pushkin). When surnames were adopted by society at large, they used those suffixes. '-sky' was only adopted in areas where there was a prominent Polish, Belarusian, or Ukrainian population living or in areas influenced by those languages.
I'm a bit confused about the rest of your argument: You are willing to concede there are regional differences, yet unwilling to acknowledge that certain naming customs may be exclusive to certain areas. The language spoken in Galicia was different than the language spoken in Moscow. It stands to reason, then, that there would be differences in naming customs. Among them, '-chuk' and '-sky' are common in this region and virtually unknown in Moscow.
That does not mean Ilya Kovalchuk is Ukrainian. No more so than Colton Parayko is. Both are however many generations removed from Ukraine. Both also have what could be considered Ukrainian names, in the same way Rielly, Coffey, and Quinn are Irish names.
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