there are two letters in the cyrilic alphabet that you're interchanging here: и and й. "и" is pronounced 'ee' as in 'see'. "й" is the 'y' in 'yes' "russia" in russian is pronounced 'ro-see-ya' and spelled with a "и". If it was spelled with a "й" it would be pronounced 'ro-sya' which would not be spelled that way since the last letter is a two-sound symbol, blah blah blah. what i THINK the source of the misunderstanding might be is this: if you look on the russian wikipedia at http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D1%8F the top of the paragraph says "Росси́я". this is NOT the same thing as й although it can often look the same. the tick at the top there is a stress indicator. i think technically they're valid in english as well but i don't remember ever seeing them except in maybe ESL textbooks. on the other hand they're pretty common in russian, i've seen whole older books with stress indicators on every word. it's pretty damn anoying.

now it's possible that some other country that uses cyrilic lettering spells russian with the й but i wouldn't know. then again i'm not sure why they'd be writing out "russia" on their tanks.

once again the tank looks great. sorry to nitpick. feel free to get on my case when i misspell english. :-)