On September 19, 2025, .SU – the oldest Russian domain and one of the oldest country-code top-level domains in the world – turned 35 years old. On September 19, 1990, a record for the new top-level domain .SU, for Soviet Union, was added to the InterNIC database. Interestingly enough, the domain could have been called .USSR, but the short and catchy abbreviation for Soviet Union, .SU, was ultimately chosen.
Today, .SU has over 109,000 domain names registered there, most of them in Russia (almost 96,000). The domain is managed by RIPN. In 2019, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor) included .SU in the Russian national domain zone, along with .RU and .РФ.
.SU is a linguistically diverse domain and has long been one of the most active promoters of the Cyrillic alphabet on the internet. Even before the launch of Russia’s first Cyrillic domain, .РФ, .SU allowed registrations in national languages, making it a pioneer in supporting linguistic diversity online. In April 2008, restrictions on registering domains with the xn-- prefix were lifted in the .SU zone, enabling partial address entry in browsers in native scripts, including Russian. Just a few months later, in August 2008, an additional 37 Cyrillic characters were approved. This milestone expanded support for the national languages of Russia’s peoples, making it possible to register .SU domains in Altai, Bashkir, Buryat, Dolgan, Kalmyk, Komi, Koryak, Mari, Nanai, Nenets, Ossetian, Sami (without vowel length), Tatar, Tuvan, Udmurt, Khakass, Khanty, Chuvash, Evenki, Even, and Yakut, among others. Today, .SU supports registrations not only in Latin and Cyrillic but also in Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew. Soon, support will extend to four more languages – Chinese, Thai, Hindi, and Korean – turning the domain into a fully-fledged platform for the languages of the BRICS countries.
On this anniversary, the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ extends warm congratulations to the RIPN team. We wish .SU many more years of success, bold projects, and new achievements.
