On December 14, the Pashkov House in Moscow hosted the 2025 Runet Prize ceremony. This national award recognizes outstanding contributions to Russia’s technology sector and digital landscape, with winners celebrated across 27 categories.
The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ was awarded a special 2025 Runet Prize for Fruitful Cooperation over 15 Years of .РФ. The award was presented by Dmitry Gulyaev, Director General of the Russian Association for Electronic Communications (RAEC). In his remarks, Gulyaev noted that the Center’s collaboration with RAEC extends beyond specific projects to include vital work in cybersecurity and digital transformation.
In its role as Strategic Partner for the awards, the Coordination Center sponsored a special category, Internet in the Native Language. This category was established to mark the 15th anniversary of Russia’s Cyrillic domain, .РФ, and involved projects that help preserve and develop Russia’s linguistic diversity online. Eligible initiatives were those that bring the internet closer to users, make it more accessible, create content in Russia’s minority languages, and strengthen the country’s diverse cultural fabric.
The 2025 winners in the Internet in the Native Language category are:
- Yugra Research Institute of Information Technology (Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area – Yugra) for the Mansi Corpus project, which created a comprehensive, publicly accessible digital corpus of texts in the Mansi language.
- Russian domain name registrar Ardis for its support in hosting the international conference for ccTLD registries and registrars of CIS, Central, and Eastern Europe (TLDCON 2025) in Kaliningrad.
The award committee also issued special diplomas to:
- The Federal Agency for Ethnic Affairs for its consistent work to preserve linguistic diversity amid globalization and digital transformation.
- The House of Peoples of Russia for supporting languages of Russia’s ethnic groups, including conducting the first IT monitoring of 70 languages for the UNESCO World Atlas of Languages and advocating for their inclusion in the Unicode standard.
- Yandex for supporting Russia’s languages across its services, including Yandex.Translate, Yandex.Browser, Yandex.Cloud, and Yandex.Keyboard.
Andrey Vorobyev, Director of the Coordination Center, presented the awards and reflected on the anniversary:
“Fifteen years ago, the launch of the .РФ domain marked the Russian language’s powerful entry into the internet’s addressing system. In this anniversary year, 18 more of Russia’s linguistic communities are continuing this journey. Together with our colleagues in language digitalization, we are committed to ensuring that even the most vulnerable languages not only survive but thrive within the Russian digital space.”
All winners in the Internet in the Native Language category, along with the Coordination Center itself, received a special award statuette featuring the .РФ domain instead of the standard .RU. Only eight such statuettes exist: five were awarded in 2020 for the 10th anniversary of .РФ, while three were presented at this year’s ceremony.
Background: The Runet Prize has been held since 2004. The 2025 edition saw around 900 participants across 22 categories. The award honors organizations that have contributed to building a trusted digital environment and improving the quality of life for Russian citizens. It is organized by the Russian Association for Electronic Communications (RAEC) with financial support from the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media.
