Today, November 11, 2025, marks 15 years since the start of open domain name registration in the .РФ zone. On November 11, 2010, registration in the Cyrillic .РФ domain opened to the public, resulting in over 240,000 names registered within the first 24 hours and nearly 700,000 by the end of the first month.
Today, there are over 780,000 domain names registered in .РФ, with an average of 560 new domains added daily, making it the largest Cyrillic domain in the world. The zone currently counts 152 accredited registrars and over 334,000 registrants.
Starting in 2025, the Russian country-code TLD .РФ has allowed the registration of internet addresses using characters from the 17 official languages of Russia’s constituent republics. The new, expanded List of Permitted Cyrillic Characters for .РФ domain names is set forth in a new annex to the Terms and Conditions of Domain Name Registration in .RU and .РФ. Furthermore, in December 2025, the ‘ӕ’ character from the Ossetian alphabet will be added to this list, officially incorporating another language, Ossetian.
For reference, work on creating the .РФ country-code domain for using the Cyrillic alphabet and the Russian language began as early as 2008. The application submitted by the Coordination Center was among the first for an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) country code top-level domain (ccTLD) immediately after ICANN approved the relevant procedure. In November 2009, the application for the .РФ domain was approved. Pre-registration for the new domain zone opened in early 2010. On May 12, 2010, records for the new domain zone were added to the internet’s root zone, a date considered the official birthday of the world’s first Cyrillic top-level domain – .РФ. The first websites in the new zone – president.рф and government.рф – were also launched that day.
Find out more about the Cyrillic domain .РФ on the anniversary website at 15.кц.рф.
