the funny thing about the liberal signaling with new spelling/pronunciation is supposed to somehow be a dig against russians but they never pronounced it that way? or spelled it that way. the new western keeev puts them closer to the same page as russians

I think that name sucks to begin with. Let's call it Azagarium, which is apparently what it (or another city in the area) was called on Ptolemy's world map. I think Azagarium is a sick ass name.

pick one depending on who you want to piss off at any given moment

For a fun reddit ban, on lib subreddits, call the capitol of Ukraine "Moscow".

Call it whatever it was called in your language before the lib fixation with Ukraine. The locals call it something different and so what? Lots of cities around the world have different names in different languages, Roma is Rome in English and Rom in German. Praha is Prague in English and Prag in German. Moskva is Moscow in English and Moskau in German.

People have always modified the names of important cities to fit the sounds of their own languages. There is no disrespect in that, if anything, foreign languages having their own version of the name of somewhere is a sign that the place is considered important.

just use an ancient exonym, Kænugarður

If you want to anglicize /kɪjiu̯/ then that ends up rhyming with "pee-ew", at least it does for me, which is maybe not ideal. If you're going by the Russian pronunciation, it's /ˈkʲi(j)ɪf/ which should anglicize to /kijɪf/ or /kif/ ("KEY-yiff" or "keef").

Which is to say that next to nobody pronounces the name particularly close to either its Russian or Ukrainian names. But ultimately the pronunciation doesn't really matter much anyways. I've heard people say the name as /kiv/ since before the war, particularly in Norwegian, possibly by analogy with the city of Kiel in the German part of Jutland — a city which many Norwegians like to travel to by boat, "kielferga".

So basically, say it kinda however makes sense or sounds right to you, is my advice.

I say whichever comes out of my mouth more naturally during the instance. For some reason, Ukrainians and Americans expect everyone to start using Ukraine’s version of the word even though other non-russian languages have their own established way of pronouncing it.

Say it differently from whomever you're talking to.

nib

cyrillic? never heard of it

West russia. Or, well I guess more properly it would be the Russian Borderland.

Apparently it's kiv or kiev, but it's kief according to libs.

kief

Kgif

Until they change the way the chicken is spelled I’m not budging