Yes, it had to be identical. The problem with romanization of Cyrillic is that there's no commonly accepted standard, and I suspect the employees who process th

Yes, it had to be identical. The problem with romanization of Cyrillic is that there's no commonly accepted standard, and I suspect the employees who process the applications were very unlikely to be Russian, so they would have no idea how to match our romanized variant to what's found on the ID scans. At least if they allowed Cyrillic in the submit form, they could have compared it visually as a set of pictograms, no need to know Cyrillic by heart. And it wasn't some US-only application thing we ran into by mistake, it talked about providing identification documents "of your country". But for some reason, they excluded all countries which don't use Latin alphabet.