A few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new Russian government reformed car license plates. Along with the country code RUS, plates got their first graphic element other than letters and numbers: the national flag. Regions also switched from letter codes to numeric ones, with each region’s number placed on the plate. The old X0000XX format gave way to X000XX plus a region code.

For whatever reason, the people behind the reform apparently assumed the new plates would be enough for everyone for a long time to come. In reality, the country’s car fleet grew at a tremendous pace in the new capitalist era, and within a few years codes 90–99 had to be added to the original 89. Later, extra digits were prepended to the codes to expand the number of combinations. By 2022, many regions had two or more codes at once — Moscow alone has 77, 99, 97, 177, 199, 197, 777, 799 and 797.

The shortage of combinations is compounded by the fact that the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets share only some letters, and the rest simply wouldn’t be understood outside Russia and other Cyrillic-script countries. So only twelve letters are available for use on plates.

One region code gives a little over 1 million combinations in the X000XX format. But Moscow alone has about 4 million registered cars, St. Petersburg about 2 million — and the numbers keep growing.

Beyond the technical problem, there’s an aesthetic one: the current plate design looks dated. The EU has had a plate standard since 1998, and most other countries on the continent follow it to some extent — flag and country code on the left, large letters and numbers of equal height. Russia is a European country too, so adopting the common standard would be logical.

In my view, a license plate reform in Russia is long overdue. The current plates haven’t met the country’s needs for years, and you can’t keep adding digits to region codes forever — it only makes an already dated design harder to read.

I reviewed every European plate design and, based on that, drafted my own vision of the update. Turkey is a relevant example: Istanbul is the most populous city in Europe, so they clearly faced the same problem when designing their plates. Here’s what they came up with:

But while the Turkish plate solves the combinations problem, it doesn’t show where the car is from — or at least not in a way the average person would recognize. French plates helped here: on the right they carry the code of the department where the vehicle is registered, plus the emblem of its region.

I combined the French and Turkish approaches for the updated Russian plate. Here’s the result:

Since Russia isn’t an EU member and isn’t planning to become one, the blue stripe behind the country code and flag wouldn’t be justified, however good it looks. So I kept the background white and placed the country code and flag on the left without a stripe. Six digits and two letters give over 100 million combinations for civilian vehicles — more than enough.

I kept the numeric region codes but added the region’s coat of arms. It makes the plate look more modern and lets you read a car’s region at a glance. On police plates, the regional coat of arms is replaced by the emblem of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. On plates for other uses, the flag and coat of arms can be dropped entirely.

The new plates look modern and appealing, and they won’t run out of combinations. They fit the established European visual standard while keeping a distinctive feature: the coats of arms of Russia’s regions.