During the first working week of the year, an expanded meeting of the Youth Council of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and the Center’s project leaders took place. The meeting, held on January 14, focused on discussing priority areas for 2026, as well as potential forms of Youth Council involvement in the implementation of the Coordination Center’s key projects.
Andrey Vorobyev, Director of the Coordination Center, presented the strategy for priority areas of the Center’s activities through 2030, published earlier this year. One of the central pillars of the strategy is supporting linguistic diversity in the .РФ domain. Launched in August 2025 to mark the 15th anniversary of the .РФ domain, the project enables the registration of domain names using characters from 18 languages of Russia’s ethnic groups. As of January 2026, approximately 1,800 such domains have been registered in the .РФ zone. Plans are underway to expand the list of supported languages.
Maria Kolesnikova, Chief Analyst of the Coordination Center and Head of the Поддерживаю.РФ project, along with Vadim Mikhailov, the Center’s Infrastructure Consultant, shared insights into the practical and analytical aspects of promoting multilingualism on the internet and implementing universal acceptance principles. Participants discussed the importance of universal acceptance for digital inclusion, the need for software products to support internationalized domain names and email addresses, and the international context of this issue, including efforts within IGF, WSIS, and ICANN platforms.
Special attention was given to potential areas of Youth Council engagement in the Coordination Center’s projects. These include participation in international and regional conferences, the preparation of research and analytical publications, the compilation of examples of Russia’s ethnic languages in use online, and the organization of educational events and lectures for students.
“It’s important for us not to limit ourselves to technical aspects alone but to address multilingualism through culture, education, and real user experiences. We hope that our work, which also involves members of the Youth Council, will help draw attention to the issue of the digital language divide and identify practical solutions,” said Andrey Vorobyev, Director of the Coordination Center.
Following the meeting, a work plan for the Youth Council was drafted for the first half of 2026, including the preparation of presentations, research materials, and participation in thematic events linked to the Year of Unity of the Peoples of Russia and the Day of Russia’s Ethnic Languages.
