Paul Eggert wrote:
Ukrainian time zones Europe/Kiev, Europe/Uzhgorod and Europe/Zaporozhye: These might better be named Europe/Kyiv, Europe/Uzhhorod and Europe/Zaporizhia, being transliterations of the Ukrainian - rather than Russian - place-names.
The tz database prefers the most common English spelling for the place names in question; this is why we use "Moscow" rather than "Moskva", for example. "Kiev" is more popular than "Kyiv" in English. The other two names are similar. If the English spellings change (which is what happened with Mongolian and Kazakh names) we can revisit this. In the meantime, I can add some comments about this, and change the zone.tab entry to look like the following (a similar solution is already in place for Greenland locations):
UA +4750+03510 Europe/Zaporozhye Zaporozh'ye, E Lugansk / Zaporizhia, E Luhansk
Makes sense to me. For want of a better metric, Google shows more (English-only, modified in the last year) results for Uzhgorod than Uzhhorod and more results for Zaporozhye than Zaporizhia. For sufficiently obscure places, though, a most common English spelling must be very hard to establish. I guess the interesting thing about Kiev/Kyiv is that Ukraine wishes the English spelling to be 'Kyiv', although 'Kiev' is of course much more widely used.