Spain?

Yeah, in that case I understand.

They seem to only have a rule against dehumanisation of minorities, where the term is pretty clearly intended to mean minorities generally subject to persecution/bigotry:

4. No bigotry, sexism, racism, antisemitism, dehumanization of minorities, or glorification of National Socialism.

I feel the ban is a bit over the top, anyway. I get the post being removed for being a bit too aggressive, but to immediately ban over (what I presume) is a first offence… I’d simply give a warning myself.

Judging from this very polemic article by linguistic anthropologist Kathryn E. Graber, the argument is that a linguistic distinction that exists in Russian (and Ukrainian) is mirrorred in other languages using the definite article. ‘Na Ukraine’ on the one hand literally means ‘on Ukraine’, ‘v Ukraine’ on the other ‘in Ukraine’. Graber goes on to say that ‘In Russian, a person is “na” an unbounded territory, such as a hill, but “v” a bounded territory that is defined politically or institutionally, such as a nation-state.’ She would then probably also argue that the same, in English, goes for names like ‘the Congo’, being named after a river. The claim that this is a Soviet-era practice (if what she means by that is that it arose during the Soviet Union), is simply not true, though. In Google Books you can find plenty of titles with ‘the Ukraine’ from before 1900. The earliest mention I found in English (though I didn’t look very well) was from 1672.

It anyway strikes me as very performative. You can well argue that language influences the way we view the world (though, I think the way we view the world influences the language we use much more). Even so, there are obviously much bigger (concrete) threats to Ukrainian sovereignty than (to Ukrainians) foreigners using a definite article or not. Thus, it becomes less a matter of protecting sovereignty, and more a matter of simple respect to Ukrainian sensibilities. Ukrainians may take offence at you using the definite article, and you may want to prevent that by not saying ‘the Ukraine’.

Yeah, I just left a review saying I don’t want American Trump propaganda in my apps, and then just ‘deleted’ (sort of) the thing. Getting rid of Google entirely is going to be difficult, though.

I’ve not read the article, but checking this, it’s actually in the Dutch version as well… Bunch of fuckers.

EDIT: Woops, got confused myself

The plural -s in Dutch only gets an apostrophe if the stem word ends on an open vowel. So it’s cavia-cavia’s on the one hand, but kikker-kikkers on the other (and la[de]-lades). So even in Dutch this’d be incorrect ;)