"Oriental Republic of Uruguay" and other weird official state names

[Vosem]

A little bit that ag forgot to mention about the reason Ukrainian nationalists are mad about Russians using "na Ukraine" rather than "v Ukraine" is that the Russian word "Ukraina" is derived from the word kray, or edge, and related words are okraina ("borderland"), or the Serbian word "krajina" that was used as the name for a Balkan country ("frontier"). The expression "na Ukraine" derives from the expression "na krayu" (to which there is a literal equivalent in English: "on the edge"), which implies that Ukraine is the edge of something (historically, the Soviet Union/Russian Empire/Russian cultural sphere). Because Ukrainian nationalists see Ukraine as its own separate phenomenon, they want Ukraine to take the normal preposition for a country ("v", not "na").

The reason English used to use/sometimes still uses the expression the Ukraine is totally as a translation of the Russian (Ukraine is in this way interpreted not as a place/proper noun but as a geographic description/common noun, and therefore it needs an article), so there is an exact parallel for the linguistic debate between the Russian and English.