You are right that "C" is the Russian character for "S." You'll see the Russian word "Светлана" (Svetlana) in the title of this post, which is actually a girl's name. I suspect the original company name was chosen because it was somebody's wife, daughter or lover. I'm not being chauvinistic or overlooking the possibility that the founder might have been a woman, it's just unlikely because they are a very patriarchal culture, and were even more so in the past. The title of this post says, lampovui zavod "Svetlana" which means lamp factory "Svetlana." Russians call radio tubes "lamps."

I wonder, where was the trademark purchased? Is this an American trademark or Russian? I know Svetlana is Russian, and I think Sovtek and Electro-Harmonix are too. But New Sensor sounds like a Western company name to me. Is the name dispute a Russian/American thing? It looks like that may be the start, and then when they both wanted to take ownership of the American mark, one scrambled for the word mark and the other for the graphic, using the "C." I know that trademarks are separately owned in each country, so there may be some issues because of that too. Is that what the deal is?