Say, is Afrikaans an easy language to learn the basics of? Just out of curiosity.

I think it depends where you start from. I grew up in a place where both English and Afrikaans are widely spoken (South Africa - to my knowledge, still the only country where Afrikaans is widely spoken) and so I had some idea of the basics of both from a very young age, which helped me immeasurably.

Afrikaans is also very close to Dutch (to the point that a Dutch and an Afrikaans speaker can communicate using their respective languages with only minor difficulty, and I've managed to leverage my knowledge of Afrikaans to be able to understand most of an article written in Dutch) - so if you know Dutch, it'll probably be fairly trivial to learn Afrikaans.

Starting with Russian and English... I have very little idea of what Russian is like, so I don't know what sort of starting point that gives you.

But I think I can safely say that, all else being equal, English would be significantly more difficult to learn than Afrikaans.