Question about Russian domains

[nameboi]

Hello all.
I am trying to figure out the food-chain of Russian URLs.
Let's take пляж (meaning beach, pronounced as plaj, sort of) as an example.
So we have:
пляж.com
plaj.com
beach.ru
plaj.ru
пляж.ru - would seem like the most valuable, but so far as I can tell only latin characters can be used with .ru.

It seems that Russian-language websites mostly use .ru URLs, so then either beach.ru or plaj.ru is the most obvious URL?

What about пляж.com? Do Russians put .com after Russian words?

 

[stscac]

Many of the popular Russian domain names are in English, but if you type in the Russian language keywords into google.ru, yandex, etc., you'll see that there are very high search totals for those terms.

On nic.ru, I put in a punycode for some Russian characters in the .ru namespace, and it went forward and proceeded with registration. I did everything but check out.

Best of luck

-Steve