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Well Russian is typically not written in Latin script, similarly Japanese. I don't know of anyone who refers to Switzerland as the "Helvetic Confederation". If I had to compress the names of all of earth's countries (and many non-country entities) into two or three ASCII characters I don't imagine I'd have done much better.

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It's worth noting that Russia does have the .рф TLD ("RF" for Russian Federation) in addition to .ru.

Considering how ubiquitous Latin keyboards are I'm OK with countries with non-Latin character sets getting a Latin equivalent as it makes those domains much more accessible to a large part of the world.

The script doesn't really matter - if you write Russia's name in Russian, but using Latin letters, it would be "Rossiya". Still no "u" there anywhere.

I think we're all on the same page here. Using the English name instead of a transliteration is a compromise with downsides. It was not such a bad compromise in the early days of the internet, and now that we have Unicode domains we can have native-style tlds and that's a good thing.

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