Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu> writes:
Thanks for the heads-up. So the Crimeans will change time zones twice in the same year? Probably the least of their worries.... Speaking of which, we should move the entry for Europe/Simferopol closer to that for Europe/Moscow, to simplify this sort of maintenance.
It is amusing that all changes are supposed to happen at 02:00 Moscow time. So the folks in Vladivostok are supposed to move their clock backs at 09:00 local time?
The ITAR-TASS article is a little hazy on the details of the new time zone boundaries. Most of them seem to be the same as before. Although the article suggests that we may need to split a zone because of Zabajkal'skij kraj, I'd like to see a copy of the actual legislation before going that far. I noodled around on the State Duma website without finding the law; perhaps they're still working on publication. In the meantime, I've attached a proposed patch (all in ASCII! for the parts of the change that seem reasonably clear. I've pushed this to the experimental repository on github.
I also wonder whether neighboring countries will follow suit. Belarus, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, for example.
According to the news, this new bill will be considered in the Russian Federation Council in a week from today (on July 9, 2014) and then have to be signed by the President. Text of the bill (in Russian) could be found on State Duma web site: http://asozd2.duma.gov.ru/main.nsf/%28Spravka%29?OpenAgent&RN=431985-6&02 or http://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_russia64.html If approved, new changes will come into effect on October 26, 2014 at 02:00. (newspaper put wrong statement "at 02:00 Moscow time") Alexander Krivenyshev, WorldTimeZone.com