I was reading about the Russia-Belarus dispute over gas and started laughing almost immediately. Thankfully, the BBC (unlike some other publications, who could learn from this practice) calls the Belorussian President "Alexander Lukashenko" instead of "Lukashenka".

However, they followed Belorussian, rather than Russian, orthography to twist the common Russian name "Vladimir Semashko" into "Uladzimir Syamashka".

Apparently someone forgot to send them the memo that, even though there is a language called "Belorussian" (or, as they might like to spell it, "Belarusian" ), no one speaks it. "Officially" around 20% of the population knows it, but those people are really Poles living in the part of the country that was actually Poland before 1945 and the language they are speaking is, in actuality, Polish, but just spelled a little differently.

In actuality, the Republic of Belarus speaks Russian. Attempts at political correctness on the part of Western newspapers just seem silly in this respect.

The only thing I can think of that would be comparable to this absurdity is if the BBC (or the Economist, or whoever) were to refer to the Irish President, not as Mary McAleese, but as Máire Pádraigín Bean Mhic Ghiolla Íosa, out of deference to the five people left alive in Ireland who still speak Gaelic as their primary language.