Buy .ru Domain Name

Since 1 September 2026, only if the administrator passes identity verification through Gosuslugi (ESIA). A foreign individual needs a legal status in Russia, and a foreign company an accredited branch or representative office there. The Coordination Center separates four cases:

• Foreign individuals holding Russian temporary residence, a residence permit or a work patent: can register with a confirmed ESIA account.
• Foreign companies with an accredited branch in Russia: can register with tax-service accreditation, the director's qualified electronic signature and an organisation account in ESIA.
• Foreign individuals with no status in Russia: cannot — ESIA identification is not open to them.
• Foreign companies with no Russian presence: cannot — no organisation account in ESIA.

In short, without Russian citizenship, a company established in Russia or a status in Russia you cannot hold a .ru domain in your own name. If none of the four cases fits you, a trustee service puts a verified local administrator in place for you.

Yes: since 1 September 2026, registration, renewal, DNS changes, administrator changes, a change of registrar and delegation of a .ru domain all require identity confirmation through a confirmed Gosuslugi account, and the administrator renews that check every year. The legal basis is federal law No. 569-FZ together with the new Domain Name Registration Rules approved by Russian Government Decree No. 1119 of 31 August 2026; a second decree, No. 1120, replaced accreditation with a government-maintained list of registrars. The rollout is staged: registrars accredited before 1 September 2026 keep working the old way until they move onto the government list, at the latest on 18 January 2027.

The .ru domain keeps working until its paid term ends; in the Coordination Center's words, nobody takes it away from you. Once your registrar switches regime, however, it cannot be renewed, given a new holder or moved to another registrar without the check. If the term ends without a renewal, delegation stops and the site and mail become unreachable; a 30-day preferential renewal period then runs, and if that passes too the registration is cancelled and the name opens to everyone. For an address with brand value there is usually no way back — settle the verification, or the trustee service, well before your renewal date.

The trustee service records Atak Domain's ESIA-verified representative account in Russia as the administrator of your .ru domain, so a local party passes the check for you. Renewals, nameserver changes and transfers are carried out through that account. The domain stays in your panel and you decide how it is used; only the registry record the regulation looks at changes. It runs as an administrator / holder change application, and that paperwork belongs to the application, not to the registration: companies submit a Russian-language notarised application form on letterhead, a trade registry extract and proof of signing authority; individuals submit a passport or ID copy and the same notarised form (no apostille required). Scope and current pricing: trustee service; the document checklist, the price breakdown and every application step are set out in the .ru domain trustee guide.

No. The rule does not look at when the name was registered and provides no “early registration” exemption; the check was not run as a sweep on 1 September 2026 but is demanded at the moment of an operation. If you need no changes, the address keeps working until its term ends, but once your registrar moves to the new regime, renewal, DNS changes, administrator changes and transfers will not go through without it. For names you have held for years, too, complete a trustee application before the renewal date approaches.

To move a .ru domain to another registrar, get the AuthInfo (EPP) code from your current registrar, lift the lock if one is set, start the process on the domain transfer page and approve the confirmation sent to the address in the WHOIS record; it usually takes 5–7 business days. A transfer is blocked if the registration term has expired, if the holder or the registrar changed within the last 30 days, or if a registrar request to confirm registry data has gone unanswered. Because a change of registrar also requires the ESIA check once registrars move to the new regime, holders without Russian status should complete the transfer and the trustee arrangement by 18 January 2027 at the latest. A .ru transfer does not add a year to the expiry date; renewal stays a separate action.

For a .ru domain, the verified data comes straight from the administrator's Gosuslugi account instead of being keyed in at each registrar — the convenience the Coordination Center highlights. For individuals the verified fields are full name and patronymic, date of birth, passport details (series, number, date of issue, issuing authority and unit code), registered address, email and phone. For legal entities it is the organisation name, tax number (INN) and primary state registration number (OGRN), legal address, legal-form code (OKOPF) and the organisation's email and phone. What ESIA changes is this: identity is proved by a confirmed account rather than a paper trail — a confirmed Gosuslugi account for an individual, and an organisation account linked to it for a company. If the contract and ESIA data disagree, the operation stops — compare the two in advance.

Under the rules, delegation stops when the registration term ends: the address goes off the air that day and the registrar points the name to temporary DNS servers that redirect to its own notice page. A 30-day preferential renewal period then begins, during which only the previous holder may renew, and the registrar must send reminders 5–10 and 20–25 days after expiry. If the period runs out without renewal, the registration is cancelled and the name becomes available to everyone.

Partly. The rules set out what the WHOIS service publishes: the domain name, its DNS servers, delegation status, registration date, expiry date, the end of the preferential renewal period and the registrar supporting the record. On the holder side there is a split: a legal person's name is published in Latin script together with its tax number, while an individual is shown anonymously, with only an indication that the name belongs to a natural person. Run a lookup on the whois search page.

A .ru domain name may contain only Latin letters, digits and hyphens, must be 2 - 63 characters long and must begin and end with a letter or a digit. Case is not distinguished. One detail catches people out: hyphens cannot occupy the third and fourth positions at the same time. The Coordination Center also maintains a stop-list of strings that cannot be registered, and whether a string is on it can be checked through WHOIS.

All four point at the same country but are different arrangements:

• .ru is the national zone run by the Coordination Center.
• .рф is the Cyrillic national zone run by the same Center; the 1 September 2026 condition applies to it too, and taking it alongside .ru is a common choice for brand protection.
• .su is a separate top-level domain entered into the root zone in 1990 and administered by the non-profit RosNIIROS; the same ESIA condition applies there as well.
• .com.ru is not a top-level domain: it is a second-level name registered inside .RU since 1997, and the names you buy open at the third level beneath it.

Google separates them too: Google Search Central lists .su among the country codes it treats as generic, while .ru is not on that list and counts as a country domain tied to Russia.