Cyrillic characters have become officially operational in internet domain names.

The head of the world's governing body – Icann – was at the Internet Governance Forum in Moscow to assign the .рф domain suffix to Russia.

Last year Icann approved the use of non latin characters which cleared the way for national scripts. At the unveiling of the new domain name in Moscow, Icann president Rod Beckstrom hailed the leadership of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

“Congratulate the President of Russia, President Medvedev, who has been an absolutely critical supporter of not only the IDN, and the first international domain name being launched publicly in the world today, for .rf, Cyrillic for Russia, but his very strong statements in support of the internationalized domain name programme in 2008 to the people of Russia, to the Russian diaspora around the world, spread to the whole world and provided a tremendous impetus for this entire programme, which is in many ways being launched today.