Russia Emoji & Symbols

The Russia flag emoji 🇷🇺 shows the white, blue and red tricolour. Russian ships flew it from the time of Peter the Great around 1700; from 1918 the Soviet red flag replaced it, and the tricolour came back in August 1991, which is why 22 August is now Russia's Flag Day. People who want the colours without the flag write 🤍💙❤️, or stack ⬜ 🟦 🟥 one per line.

Like every country flag, 🇷🇺 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇷 + 🇺 for the country code RU. Phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters RU instead, while the person you send it to on a phone still sees 🇷🇺.

The coat of arms is a golden double-headed eagle on a red shield, with Saint George slaying the dragon on its breast; there is no two-headed eagle emoji, so 🦅 stands in. 🐻 the brown bear is the animal the world, and Russians themselves, most often pick for the country; Misha the bear cub was the mascot of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. 🪆 the matryoshka, the wooden doll with smaller dolls nested inside, was first made in the 1890s and became an emoji in 2020. ☦️, the Orthodox cross with its slanted lower bar, is the cross of the Russian Orthodox Church, seen on church domes across the country.

Many people also look for a Soviet Union emoji. There is no standard, broadly supported Soviet Union flag emoji; the USSR ended in 1991. Country and territory flag emoji generally use region-code pairs; England, Scotland and Wales are the only broadly supported subdivision tag-sequence flags. Online, people use ☭ or 🟥☭ to evoke the Soviet flag, with ★ for the red star.

Russian letters copy and paste: the alphabet, ₽ and «»

Russian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, 33 letters in all, and every one of them is in the grid above in capital and small form. Twelve of them look like Latin letters, but only some sound the same: А, Е, К, М, О and Т are close to their English twins, while В is v, Н is n, Р is r, С is s, У is u and Х is the kh in Bach. These look-alikes are separate Unicode characters, so a word typed with a Latin C or P instead of С or Р will not be found by search.

Some letters have no English counterpart at all. Ж is the zh sound in measure, Щ a long soft shch, and Ы a vowel made with the tongue pulled back. Ь, the soft sign, has no sound of its own and softens the consonant before it; Ъ, the hard sign, keeps a consonant apart from the vowel after it, as in объект. Ё is always stressed and pronounced yo, yet most books and newspapers print it without its dots as Е, so readers must know the word. Russian stress is free and can change the meaning: dictionaries and textbooks mark it with an acute accent, за́мок (castle) and замо́к (lock); type the combining accent ́ straight after the vowel.

Russian quotation marks are «ёлочки», "little fir trees", with „лапки“, "little paws", for a quote inside a quote, and dialogue opens with a long dash —. The sign № is everyday shorthand for number, as in Школа № 5. To type Russian, add the Russian keyboard: on a computer the standard layout is called ЙЦУКЕН after its top row, Ё sits on the key left of 1 and № on Shift+3; Windows also offers a phonetic "Russian – Mnemonic" layout. On phones, add the Russian keyboard; Ё usually hides under a long press on Е.

The ruble sign ₽ is an Р with a stroke, approved by the Bank of Russia in December 2013 and added to Unicode in 2014 as U+20BD. It goes after the amount, 100 ₽, and older price tags write руб. or р. With the Russian layout in Windows it is Right Alt+8; in Word type 20BD then Alt+X; in HTML it is ₽. Russia is also home to many other languages with letters of their own, including Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash, Chechen and Yakut. CLDR's language-population estimates for Russia are about 3.4 million for Tatar, 1.1 million for Bashkir and 1.8 million for Chuvash; each has its own collection, and the Russian language has one too, with every letter explained.

Russian emoji for food and drink

🥞 Blini, thin pancakes eaten with sour cream, jam, honey or red caviar, are the dish of Maslenitsa week, and 🥟 pelmeni, small meat dumplings from the Urals and Siberia, are the comfort food of every freezer. 🥧 stands for pirozhki, little baked or fried pies filled with cabbage, potato or meat. 🍲 is a bowl of soup: shchi of cabbage, solyanka, and Ukrainian borscht, which is also cooked all over Russia. 🫜, the root vegetable emoji used here for beetroot, colours both borscht and the New Year salad herring under a fur coat 🐟, while 🥗 is Olivier, the potato salad no 31 December table goes without.

The everyday table has dark rye bread 🍞, buckwheat kasha 🥣, potatoes 🥔 from the dacha, pickled cucumbers 🥒 and mushrooms 🍄 gathered in the woods. 🍖 is shashlik, meat grilled on skewers at the dacha in the May holidays, and 🌻 the sunflower seeds people crack on park benches.

Tea is drunk all day: 🫖 for the teapot (once the samovar), 🍋 for a slice of lemon in the glass, 🍯 for honey or varenye, home-made jam, and 🍪 for pryaniki, spiced gingerbread, the most famous from Tula. 🥃 is a glass of vodka, drunk in toasts with pickles and other zakuski on the side.

Russia emoji for places, nature and wildlife

🏰 is the Moscow Kremlin with its red-brick walls and towers, and ⛪ Saint Basil's Cathedral beside it on Red Square; there is no onion-dome emoji, so ⛪ covers every church. 🚇 is the Moscow Metro, opened in 1935 and known for stations decorated like palaces, and 🏙️ the glass towers of Moscow City. In Saint Petersburg 🏛️ stands for the Hermitage in the Winter Palace, 🌉 for the bridges over the Neva that are raised at night for ships, and ⛲ for the fountains of Peterhof. 🚂 is the Trans-Siberian Railway, the world's longest railway line, about 9,300 km from Moscow to Vladivostok, and 🕌 the Kul Sharif mosque in the Kazan Kremlin, a reminder that Islam is Russia's second religion.

Russia is the largest country in the world and spans eleven time zones. 🏞️ is Lake Baikal in Siberia, the deepest lake on Earth, home of 🦭 the nerpa, one of the very few seals that live only in fresh water. 🏔️ is Elbrus in the Caucasus, the highest mountain in Europe, 🌋 the volcanoes of Kamchatka, and 🌲 the taiga, the endless conifer forest. ❄️ and 🛷 belong to the long winter, and 🧖🌿 to the banya, the steam bath where people beat themselves gently with a venik of birch or oak twigs.

The wildlife emoji people pick for Russia are 🐅 the Amur tiger and 🐆 the Amur leopard of the Far East, 🐻‍❄️ the polar bears of the Arctic coast, 🐺 wolves and 🦊 foxes, 🦌 the reindeer herded by the Nenets and other peoples of the north, and 🫎 the moose of the forests.

Russian holidays and the emoji people send

New Year is the biggest holiday of the year. The tree 🎄 is a New Year tree, yolka, and the gifts come from Ded Moroz, Grandfather Frost, with his granddaughter Snegurochka, for whom 🎅 has to stand in. Tangerines 🍊, Olivier salad 🥗, champagne 🍾 at the stroke of the Kremlin clock and fireworks 🎆 complete the night, and "С Новым годом!" is the greeting. Orthodox Christmas follows on 7 January.

Maslenitsa, the week before Lent, is a week of blini 🥞 that ends with burning a straw figure of winter on a bonfire 🔥. At Easter people exchange dyed eggs 🥚 and say "Христос воскресе!", and candles 🕯️ burn in every church. On 8 March, International Women's Day, men give flowers: tulips 🌷 and sprigs of yellow mimosa 🌼. On Victory Day, 9 May, medals 🎖️ and parades remember the Second World War, and 12 April is Cosmonautics Day 🚀.

Ballet, books, space and sport: more Russia emoji

🩰 Ballet is one of Russia's best-known gifts to the world, from the Bolshoi in Moscow to the Mariinsky in Saint Petersburg; 🦢 is Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, first staged at the Bolshoi in 1877, and 🎭 the theatre of Chekhov and Stanislavski. 🎼 covers Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich, 🪗 the bayan and garmon accordions of folk songs, and 📚 the books of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. ♟️ is chess, which Soviet and Russian players dominated for half a century. 🎨 and 🥄 stand for Khokhloma, wooden spoons and bowls painted in red, black and gold, and 🧣 for the flowered woollen shawls of Pavlovo Posad.

🚀 Space is a point of pride: Sputnik 🛰️ became the first artificial satellite on 4 October 1957, the dog Laika 🐕 orbited the Earth a month later, and on 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin 🧑‍🚀 became the first person in space, saying "Поехали!" ("Let's go!") at launch. 🧪 is Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table of 1869, and 🧩 Tetris, written by Alexey Pajitnov in Moscow in 1984.

In sport 🏒 ice hockey and ⛸️ figure skating lead, with ⚽ football, 🎿 cross-country skiing and biathlon, 🤸 rhythmic gymnastics, 🤼 wrestling, 🥋 sambo, a martial art created in the Soviet Union, and 🎾 tennis. Russia hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Russians also have a texting habit of their own: instead of 🙂 they type ) or ))) for a smile and ((( for sadness, the eyes of the smiley simply dropped.