On September 16 to 18, the Diplomatic Academy, a higher education institution operating under the auspices of Russia’s Foreign Ministry, hosted the 19th International Forum titled “State, business and civil society partnerships in ensuring international information security.” Held as part of the so-called Garmish Process, an initiative exploring the latest developments in terms of ICT safety since 2007, it boasted one of the highest levels of representation this year.
The event attracted an extended lineup of participants representing Russian and foreign regulators, law enforcement agencies, sectoral associations, and international organizations and groups, such as the UN, BRICS, CIS, SCO, ICRC, as well as Russian companies specializing in information security, members of the academia and educational institutions from various countries. Over 400 experts took part in the forum, and the fact that it had an online format helped expand its audience to include 45 countries.
As usual, NAIIS President Boris Miroshnikov opened the forum. Deputy Secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Oleg Khramov, who was also the co-chair of the forum’s Organizing Committee, also weighed in to wish the event’s participants success and fruitful work.
United Nations Under-Secretary-General of Disarmament Affairs Izumi Nakamitsu sent a video message to greet the participants. In it, she called for more diversity and engaging with new participants to promote consolidated efforts in ensuring international information security.
Following the opening ceremony, participants had a choice of several breakaway expert sessions. The first day included a roundtable discussion titled “International cooperation in the field of International Information Security: current state, challenges and prospects” with Anatoly Streltsov, NAIIS Vice-President, as moderator. Vladimir Gorzhaltsan, Advisor to the Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, took part in this session with a presentation titled “Sovereignty, standardization and cooperation in International Information Security. A hind-sight study.”
Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrey Vorobyev also took the floor at the forum’s session “Current challenges of preserving traditional spiritual and moral values in the global information space” with a presentation titled “Supporting and promoting multilingualism online as a center pillar of state sovereignty.” In his remarks, he shared some statistics on Russia’s language diversity. In fact, people in Russia currently use 155 languages, even if only 10 percent of them benefit from extensive use, more or less, while others are on the verge of extinctoin. Another 15 languages can be described as dormant or have become extinct since early 20th century. All these data come from the 2020-2021 national census.
“A dormant language describes a situation when people stop using a particular language in their everyday lives, do not teach their children to speak it, while there are still writings, distionaries, literature in this language, and the older generation still remembers some of it. This means that educational and cultural projects and digital technology can help revive a dormant language. This is why every step to preserve language diversity matters,” andrey Vorobyev pointed out.
The Coordination Center’s Director went on to talk about the steps his organization has been taking in this regard. This includes the new version of the Domain Name Registration Rules for .RU and .РФ domains. Starting August 11, 2025, the country-code .РФ domain offers the option of registering domain names containing characters and symbols of 17 state languages of various republics which are part of the Russian Federation.
“This enables anyone to register a website with a name in their mother tongue so that it sounds familiar for people who speak the language. This promotes multilingualism, brings the internet closer and makes it more accessible for millions of users, while also giving people a stronger sense of cultural identity and helps preserve languages in the digital space,” Andrey Vorobyev pointed out, adding that the effort to offer domain name registrations in more minority languages will continue.
Typefaces also matter when it comes to building a digital ecosystem. In order to ensure that a given language can be used online, it is imperative that all its letters can be visualized on the screen, which remains one of the key challenges in terms of supporting minority languages online. Sergey Bobryshev, Commercial Director at ParaType and members of UNESCO’s Information for All Committee, shared his company’s years-long experience of developing Cyrillic typefaces compatible to Russia’s minority languages.
In his remarks, the speaker said that typefaces are currently one of the main tools for preserving language identities online and that ParaType was proactive in this domain. His company developed open-source typefaces PT Sans, PT Serif and PT Astra, which support 153 languages spoken by the people of Russia.
“Use these multilingual typefaces – they offer much more than just Cyrillic characters. ParaType’s fonts were designed to promote unity across Russia,” Sergey Bobryshev said in conclusion.
