The Russian registry announced that the amount of registered .РФ domain names has just passed the milestone of 900.000 registrations. This new extension was introduced 11 months ago and is a Cyrillic representation of .ru. The “original” Latin-written version “.ru” still has almost 4 times as many domain names registered under it, but that probably shouldn’t come as a surprise as this TLD was already introduced almost two decades ago.
Registrations under .РФ are still restricted to only allow registration for people or companies with a Russian address. But with many registrars, this can be by-passed by using a local presence service for .РФ. From November 11’th onwards, all restrictions will be lifted.
It is notable that only 63% of the .РФ are in actual use. It looks like many have simply reserved their domain name under this Russion domain name extension but aren’t actually using it yet.