Starting September 1, owning a .ru domain will require something most foreign registrants simply can’t provide: a verified Russian government identity.
The rule stems from a law Russia signed in December 2025, and it covers both new registrations and the roughly six million .ru domains already active. To keep a domain, owners must verify their identity through Gosuslugi, the Russian government’s portal for state services, which requires Russian identity documents like a passport. Until someone completes that check, they can’t register, renew, transfer, or even repoint a domain, and if they never verify, Russia cancels the domain and opens it back up for someone else to claim.
For Russian citizens, this is mostly a formality since many already hold a Gosuslugi account. For foreign owners, it’s a much bigger problem. There’s no separate verification path for non-Russians yet, and nothing concrete had come together as of mid-2026. That leaves foreign .ru holders with three options, none of them great: hand over identity documents to the Russian government, pay for a workaround, or abandon the domain entirely. Some registrars, including Com Laude, are building trustee services where a Russian entity holds the domain on the owner’s behalf, though they’re still working out the details rather than selling them today.
What makes this bigger than a Russia-specific story is the reminder it carries: country-code domains answer to the laws of whatever country runs them, and that country can change the rules whenever it wants. China has required similar identity verification for .cn domains for years. Russia’s own internet regulator started suspending .ru domains, including news outlets, without court orders back in late 2025.
Lawyers have pointed out that this effectively turns domain registration into a revocable permit rather than something resembling ownership. And the disruption doesn’t always come from the domain’s own government, either. When Britain agreed to hand the Chagos Islands over to Mauritius, that decision put the future of .io, a domain popular with tech startups, into sudden question, entirely unrelated to anything those businesses had done.
For anyone building a brand on a country-code domain, the practical takeaway isn’t to avoid them outright, since plenty run smoothly and reliably. It’s to understand who actually controls the domain and to keep a neutral fallback, like a .com, registered just in case.
