The U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, apologized on Wednesday in his Twitter blog for using the colloquial name of Russia’s Urals city of Yekaterinburg.
McFaul’s apology came after he was criticized by bloggers for calling the city of Yekaterinburg, "Ye-burg," a common colloquial name for the city by Russians that carries an expletive connotation.
“I’ll be in Ye-burg at the Innoprom,” McFaul wrote in Russian on Tuesday in response to a follower’s question of his attendance at the Innoprom 2012, the International Ural Exhibition and Forum of Industry and Innovations that will be held in Yekaterinburg on July 12-15.
“I will never cut and paste again from another follower. The richness of the Russian language on Twitter continues to amaze me,” McFaul wrote on Wednesday, adding that he copypasted the slang word from his follower’s post.
It is not the first time the U.S ambassador has apologized over his linguistic slips-ups in Russian.
In April, McFaul had to apologize for his language when he called Russia a “wild country” while journalists from the state-run NTV channel were following him.
In June, the U.S. envoy apologized for his statement about the Manas Airport in Kyrgyzstan, when he told students at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow that Russia had “bribed” Kyrgyz officials in 2009 to prompt the country to shut down the U.S. military airbase there.
