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Would you mind providing a little bit more information about where and how you stumbled upon this name? For example, were you able to see in which city or region in Russia the bearer of the name lived in? I tried finding information about the name based on the information that you had already provided, but I am having a hard time finding a decent amount of bearers, let alone etymological information about the name. As such, the tiniest crumb of extra information that you can provide might help.

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From what I can tell so far, the proper Russian spelling of the name is probably Батаня (Batanya), rather than Батания (Bataniya), which would have been the most logical guess. I am basing this on the fact that Батаня (Batanya) is the only spelling that actually yielded some results on VKontakte (ВКонтакте), the Russian equivalent of Facebook. It showed three women in total: one was 66 years old and from Chirchiq (in Uzbekistan), another was 56 years old and from Zhdanovka (not sure where that is: it could be in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia or Ukraine, as there are several places with that name across these countries) and the third one had no information publicly listed. If this is anything to go by, then this name is not only extremely rare but also possibly not of Russian origin in the first place (i.e. it may be Kazakh or Uzbek, or even Arabic or Persian, since Arabic and Persian names are quite common in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan).

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I also tried the spellings Ватания (Vataniya) and Ватаня (Vatanya), by the way - but these yielded even less useful search results on Google.

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Interestingly, when running some of these spellings through Google Translator, I was asked if I didn't mean батяня (batyanya) instead. This is apparently the Russian equivalent of the English word "pop, dad", which itself is probably a more elaborate form (or even a double diminutive) of Russian батя (batya) meaning "dad".

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Either way, I personally believe that this name is unlikely to be the Russian form of Bethania, as the Russian form of this biblical town's name is Вифания (Vifaniya). In addition to that, Vifaniya does not seem to be in use as a given name in Russia at all, indicating that the town's name has never caught on as a given name like Bethany has in the English-speaking world. However, the name does kind of look like it has its roots in a Semitic language (such as Arabic or Hebrew), as it looks like it could contain the Proto-Semitic element *bayt meaning "house". So, who knows.... perhaps Batanya is an extremely obscure and old-fashioned variant of Bethania. Someone else here will have to shed further light on that. In the meantime, I hope that the information that I have dug up so far will be of help to you somewhat. :)

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Proud first-time aunt to Emilia (born November 2015).