"Молоко и хлеб уже на столе."
Translation:The milk and the bread are already on the table.
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Many people using this aren't native english speakers either, so judging these "the"s and "a"s quite stricly but somewhat randomly is not helping people to learn Russian... For instance this russian sentence is probably correctly understood without putting a single "the" into the English translation.
This is a little tricky. Russian cases can be described in more than one way, and all those descriptions are correct. However, depending on the description you prefer, the terms are used a little differently.
(1) The traditional description of Russian grammar uses 6 cases. In the 6-case system, 'Locative' is the old name of the 'Prepositional' case, and they mean the same thing.
With this interpretation, «о лесе» 'about the forest' and «в лесу» 'in the floor' are two different prepositional-case forms. Some nouns just have 2 different prepositional-case forms. Then, «лесе» is the first prepositional-case form, and «лесу» is the second prepositional-case form.
This is the description taught at Belarusian schools.
(2) In descriptions that allow for more than 6 cases, 'Locative' and 'Prepositional' are different cases: «о лесе» is the prepositional case, and «в лесу» is the locative case.
This way, those are two separate cases that happen to coincide for most nouns, except a few like «лес».
Whatever description you use, for most nouns, those forms coincide (в воде vs. о воде, в поле vs. о поле, в столе vs о столе).