It looks like this has been officially signed by the President, and this is now a formal law. Changes will take into effect on 24th of July. http://ria.ru/society/20160704/1458396876.html Regards, Dmitry Thanks for the heads-up. Since it seems so likely this will go through, I'm attaching a proposed patch that I have installed into the experimental tz database on Github. While I'm in the neighborhood this patch also removes invented abbreviations for Asia/Novosibirsk by switching to numeric abbreviations for that location and for Asia/Novokuznetsk (which used the same invented abbreviation).