Transliteration is a difficult issue. Everyone accepts that there are different words for the same things in one language than in another, including the original or host language. Nobody thinks saying “Spain” instead of Espana (or, officially, Reino de Espana, or the Kingdom of Spain) is intended as a slight against the legitimacy of the Spanish people or government — though I haven’t asked a Catalonian. One of the wonderful things about English is how readily we English speakers take on terms from other languages: think cul-de-sac, aloha, and tsunami. But names for places prick at sensitive issues of national identity. Don’t mix up the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China.

The matter has become hotter than usual given the unprovoked attack on Ukraine, whose foreign ministry has operated a campaign to get foreign countries and citizens to recognize, per the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs PR project’s name, that it’s “KyivNotKiev.” Pronounce these, respectively, keev and key-evv. The Ukrainian government mandated the change in 1995, but it got little to no international uptake until well after Russian “little green men” without insignia seized Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea in 2014.