On Mon, Oct 31, 2016 at 2:48 AM, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

Sure, the basic idea is that the tz database should reflect common practice in English-language abbreviations, rather than inventing and/or imposing abbreviations. So I have been gradually removing invented abbreviations and replacing them with UT offsets.

You may have been too aggressive in this effort. Some of the abbreviations that may have been originally invented by you or Olson have since come into common practice. The use of English abbreviations of Russian time zones is fairly common in Russia. Interestingly, with the exception of MSK (МСК), the timezone abbreviations are not translated/transliterated to Russian in Russian language documents and used in Latin script which is ubiquitous in anything computer related.

See, for example, <https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Время_в_России>.