<<On Wed, 01 Apr 2015 22:37:36 +0300, Dzmitry Kazimirchyk <dkazimirchyk@gmail.com> said:
If it is an official IANA position on the matter, I am very disappointed. It is pretty much ignoring the fact of existence of sovereign time zone name of one country in favour of another countries' name. Having in mind the fact that it is "Moscow time" time which had its rules changed from UTC+4 to UTC+3 and not "Minsk time" which stayed the same, it makes this thing look even more biased.
The normal convention for zones that do not have a conventional English-language initialism is to use either three letters of the city plus "T", or the ISO 3166-2 alpha-2 code plus "T" -- so the expectation would be that Minsk would get either "MINT" or "BYT". I don't believe that IANA has an official position here; IANA hosts the database but does not maintain it. -GAWollman