Regarding the suggestion that KP is a blend of India-Pakistan and thus is "equally offensive" (to the extent you can measure these things) as a Japan-Korea, does anyone know if the KP city names contain a blend of both India and Pakistan (or other countries')-type names? (Hindi/Urdu, or whatever)?
For better or for worse they are driven by the consumers. If KP is indeed a mix of India and Pakistan that would be somewhat surprising as I imagine they have many India/Pakistan consumers (maybe I'm wrong), and as far as blending Eastern Europe and Russia, maybe they figured they don't have enough Eastern European non-Russians who care enough. (Russians, on the other hand, I presume don't care because many consider EE to be a part of Russia ethnically/culturally, from what I understand)
Since Hindi and Urdu started out as one language but were only separated due to different writing systems and the religion of the speakers (simplified) I doubt there is much difference to find in the city names. Maybe some city names are based on one of the other many languages spoken in that neighborhood I don't know cause I can't speak any of them
. And as far as customers, I think it is still a developing region and the amount of players for these kind of games isn't that high. You rarely see anyone from that region on any of the gaming forums anyway either.
Russians have a close historic, religious and cultural connection with the other East Slavs like the Belarus and the Ukrainians. Religiously and somewhat culturally they have connections with the South Slavic Serbs and Bulgarians. Romanians/Moldovans share the same religion but are ethnically and linguistically (like there name already suggests) a Roman people.
The West Slavic people like the Poles, Czech and Slovak are Catholic and except for being occupied by the Russian Empire (Poland) for some time, have a much lesser connection with the Russians (please someone from there correct me if I'm wrong). The Hungarians are Catholic and are ethnically and Linguistically close related to the Fins and Estonians and historically more connected with the Austrians to the west then the Russians to the east. The Baltic people (Latvians and Lithuanians) aren't Slavic either and neither are the Estonians but were after the collapse of the huge Lithuanian-Polish empire always a battleground and were for most of there history incorporated into the Russian Empire or its successors. with only short stints of independence before they became fully independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union. So they have a long historic relation with them at least and there are still a few million Native-Russians living within their borders.
And from this East and Middle European Region there are a lot of people who play these games as you can notice in all kind of gaming forums. Most games have at least a Russian version and a lot have a Polish one too like Civ5 and Civ BE!
But that still didn't stop Firaxis to combine the Poles and Russians for example into one Sponsor. So maybe they underestimated the upheaval it would give with the players in a lot of countries, even though it is in a a far away fictive future. And from what I've seen they are a lot more cautious with the new sponsors and cluster countries together that don't mind being together like in the NSA or at least tell that it took a lot of effort to combine them (like in the Al Falah middle eastern backstory). INTEGR seems to be a sole German Sponsor so maybe Japan (if it's the last Sponsor) will be too.
Probably would have been better to not make "new" countries sponsors but just people with the same ideology like in SMAC, but maybe that conflicted to much with the new Affinity system, I don't know.
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. Though seriously with almost 25 million dutch language speakers from the Netherlands and Flanders nowadays I seriously doubt we dissipated into thin air. So logically I think the population fleeing to INTEGR, NSA and even Franco-Iberian territories seems logical. But maybe our descendants integrated into those populations over time. who knows? 
