On Monday, March 17 2014, "Paul Eggert" wrote to "Alexander Krivenyshev, tz@iana.org" saying:
Alexander Krivenyshev wrote:
http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03_17/Crimea-to-switch-to-Moscow-Time-as- of-March-30-8334/
Thanks for the heads-up. That notice says that they'll switch to Moscow Time at 2pm, which means they'd advance their clocks by an hour once at 01:00 UTC (03:00 local time) and once again at 14:00 local time. Do you think they'll really do that, or do you think that the notice or translation is incorrect and Crimea will simply advance the clocks by two hours at 01:00 UTC (03:00 local time)?
The other question is whether the area that's moving to Moscow time is same as the existing Europe/Simferopol zone? The comment in the source says "central Crimea" moved to Moscow time in 1994-1997, which implies that some parts of Crimea didn't. If they're not the same, does anyone know what the largest city is in the area that was on Ukraine time in 1994-1997, but is moving to Moscow time now? The other, politically fraught, issue for the tzdb is going to be how to mark Europe/Simferopol and any other new Crimean timezones in zone.tab, i.e. whether they should keep being categorized as UA or changed to RU. My suggestion would be to leave them as UA until such time as Crimea's accession to Russia is internationally recognized, or the situation otherwise changes. -- Jonathan Lennox lennox@cs.columbia.edu