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Literally the whole media switched spelling around this time.
iRaq and iRan are silly but the "Kyiv" stuff is different.
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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chapotraphouse
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It's like the whole "Ukraine" vs "the Ukraine" in English that the media did the same thing for. Russian and Ukrainian don't have definite articles. There is no such thing as "the" in either language. The thing they argue over between Russian and Ukrainian is what preposition to use when talking about something in the territory of Ukraine saying 'на украине' (~"na ookrayeenye") versus 'в украине' (~"v ookrayeenye") meaning essentially "on Ukraine" vs "in Ukraine."
Presumed to be a legacy of an assumed origin of the name Ukraine coming from
so Украина ("Ookrayeenah") under this assumed origin meaning something akin to 'of the outer-edge (of the Russian empire)' kind of like "borderland." It is common place especially with older generations to use на украине instead of в украине, though it also often both get used interchangeably.
That's its own whole mess of history, but US English doesn't have, at all, the historical quirk of "on Ukraine" so it would've always been normal and proper to just say "in Ukraine;" and by making a thing about "Ukraine" vs "the Ukraine" they invented a new problem to then argue about that has no corollary in Russian or Ukrainian to start with.
Probably "the Ukraine" started in English because some anglo dipshit heard the preposition "na" as similar enough to "the" (and la/le for other romance languages if they even knew that) to just assume it was a definite article, and now they won't shut up about it. It's like the origin I heard from a Korean friend that yanks originally made the g*** slur for Koreans because anglos are so unworldly and pig-ignorant they heard "miguk" from Koreans, which literally means "USA/American," and thought it was the Koreans calling themselves the slur, because they assumed "mi" part is like English "me" because, and I can not stress this enough, they are dumb as hell.
There was the same debacle in Poland between something happening "on Ukraine" vs "in Ukraine". It have no real difference, the former is archaic grammar irregularity for some currently or previously bordering countries, for example: Ukraine, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Slovakia.
But there was suddenly entire shitstorm in media about it, that it refuse the status of country, it is playing into Putin propaganda etc. etc. it was a mirror thing of the Kiev vs Kyiv debacle in English which we didn't have because pronouncing "Kyiv" is pretty hard for Poles so everyone is still using traditional name in Polish "Kijów". Also of course nobody changed it for the rest of abovementioned countries.
it's ironic too because nobody who's complaining about that grammatical quirk with Kiev/Kyiv or "on Ukraine" vs "in Ukraine" seems to have an issue that the west-aligned countries calls Pridnestrovie the entirely different name "Transnistria" which actually does that thing of 'refusing the status of the country' because it just means "[the Moldovan territory] past the Dneister (river)"
and also its doubly so because Pridnestrovians don't want to be called that because it's literally the name the Romanian and German Nazis used for their occupation government when they did the Holocaust there (Transnistria Governorate)
Well, the west doesn't recognize it as a country in the first place, so it's consistent.