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A Government ID for Every .ru Domain, and a Warning for Every Country Code
by Natalia Nowak<br>·<br>July 22, 2026<br>·<br>Industry reports<br>·<br>4 min read
From September 1 , anyone who owns a .ru domain, the country-code address for Russia, will have to prove their identity through a Russian government system or lose the name. The rule covers both new registrations and the roughly six million domains already in use, and it lands hardest on the owners least able to comply: foreign businesses and individuals who cannot, or will not, hand their identity documents to the Russian state. It is a blunt reminder of something that is easy to forget when you buy a domain: a country-code address belongs, in the end, to the country behind it .
What Changes on September 1
The requirement comes from a law signed in Russia in December 2025 and takes effect on September 1, 2026 . To keep a .ru domain, the owner must verify their identity through Gosuslugi, the government portal Russians use for state services, which is tied to a national identity system. Signing up requires Russian identity documents such as a passport. Until an owner completes the check, the law blocks them from registering, renewing, transferring, or even changing where the domain points, and an owner who never verifies can have the domain cancelled and released for someone else to take.
The scale is what makes this more than a local rule. The requirement reaches the .ru zone along with Russia’s Cyrillic .рф and the old Soviet-era .su, and .ru is one of the five largest country-code domains in the world , alongside those of China, Germany, Britain and the Netherlands, with about six million names. The same law also restricts who is allowed to sell .ru domains to companies registered in Russia.
Why Foreign Owners Are the Ones at Risk
For most Russians the change is an inconvenience, because they already hold the government account the system requires. For everyone else it is closer to a wall. Verifying identity through Gosuslugi effectively requires Russian documents and a verified Russian account, and a separate process for foreigners is still being built, with nothing finalized as of mid-2026. That leaves foreign .ru owners with an unappealing choice: hand their identity details to the Russian government, pay for a workaround, or walk away from the name. Corporate registrars saw the problem coming. Com Laude and others are preparing trustee or local-presence services, where a Russian entity holds the domain on the owner’s behalf, though these are still being finalized rather than sold off the shelf. Whichever way foreign owners jump, the .ru zone is widely expected to shrink.
You Don’t Own Your .io or .ai. You Rent a Country’s Politics.
A Country Code Is Not Neutral Ground
This is where the .ru deadline stops being only a Russian story. Every country-code domain is administered under the laws of the country it represents, which means the government behind it can set the terms of use, and increasingly does. China has required identity checks for its .cn domains for years, refusing to switch a domain on until the owner’s documents are approved. Russia is now imposing a similar check, and it arrives alongside a track record of enforcement: at the end of 2025, Russia’s internet regulator began suspending .ru domains, including news sites, without a court order. Lawyers warned that the shift was turning domain registration into a revocable permit rather than a form of ownership. And the risk does not always come from the resident government. The future of .io, a favorite among technology startups, was thrown into doubt when Britain agreed to hand the Chagos Islands, the territory the domain is tied to, to Mauritius, a decision that had nothing to do with the businesses built on .io addresses.
What It Means If Your Brand Runs on a Country Code
For a business choosing where to put its address, the lesson is not to avoid country-code domains, many of which are stable and well run, but to treat the choice as one with political exposure and not only a branding decision. A country-code domain carries the rules, and the risks, of its government. Before building a brand on one, it is worth knowing who administers it and under what law, and keeping a neutral option such as a .com registered as a fallback, so a policy change abroad cannot take the brand offline. For anyone holding a .ru name specifically, the clock is concrete: verify through the Russian system, arrange a trustee, or expect to lose the domain after September 1. The wider point outlasts this one deadline. As governments treat their domains as instruments of policy, the two letters at the end of an address are no longer a neutral technical detail. They are a statement about whose rules you have agreed to live under.
Natalia...