Wow. That’s a gorgeous map. With spy satellites, they could fill in details not on published maps. The details might not be on published maps for a perfectly innocent reason: they postdated the map. I note a fair number of features on the Russian map in purple. The USGS uses magenta for features on updated maps that are visible on air photos but not field checked. I wonder if the Russians simply copied that, thinking magenta meant something more significant.

One of the oddities of Cyrillic is that a lot of things look like what thy’re not. In italics, a lower case long “e” (i) looks like “u,” lower case “p” looks like “n” and lower case “t” looks like “m.” Lower case “g” looks like a reverse “s.”

And whoever thinks it’s cool to use fancy writing and make “M’s” with a curly top bar and three stems below, please stop, or I may be forced to do something we’ll both regret. That’s actually a script capital “T” in Cyrillic. And if you like to make fake Russian writing by using backwards “R” and “N” for English “R” and “N,” I hate you.