More than 200,000 .РФ domain names were registered on day one of open registration for the Russian national Cyrillic domain. Open registration commenced on 11 November with any Russian citizen now entitled to register a .РФ domain.For the first year of the general availability period (open registration) certain restrictions apply including a restriction on registration by the foreign citizens and organisations.However as is often the case, registrars are offering registrants from abroad the opportunity to provide contact details. One such registrar is the Russian registrar REG.RU.According to the Terms and Conditions of domain names registration under domain .РФ, for the first year of the general availability period registrations are only allowed for Russian Federation citizens, legal entities registered under the Russian Federation law and foreign legal entities that have a subsidiary accredited in Russia.’Undoubtedly, a lot of foreign companies will encounter the problem of domain registration in the .РФ zone. Our goal is to help them avoid all the obstacles and in the end bring their products and services to the Russian customers’, said Alexey Korolyuk, member of Cyrillic ccTLD Implementation working group and chief executive of REG.RU.At the time of open registration going live, Russian government departments and businesses had registered more than 18,000 domains during the sunrise period, the majority by trademark holders.As many as 100,000 .РФ domains are expected to be registered by the of 2010, the director of the Coordination Centre for TLD .RU, Andrei Kolesnikov, told the ITAR-TASS newsagency..РФ was well supported at a government level with both President Dimitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin both enthusiastic supporters. So it was no surprise that the IDN would be warmly welcomed by Russian people and businesses.”Cyrillic domain names will be widely used within Russia within five years, especially within emails, and during this time Russian internet users will become used to Cyrillic domains,” Alexey Lesnikov, Director General of RU-CENTER, another leading .РФ registrar, told DomainPulse during the Brussels ICANN meeting.