Today, at 11 a.m. Moscow time, ICANN signed the zone file for .ru with a cryptographic key approved by the US Government. The news was announced during the meeting of President Obama and President Medvedev in London, and conveyed by me in Moscow, at a session on DNSSEC, with Suzanne Woolf and Steve Crocker participating by phone.
The phone was used, because after signing the zone, the Russian Internet apparently had some issues, which the local community is working upon as right now.
P.S. by now, 8:45 Moscow time, the problems are solved. They were not related to the signing of the root, but to an error in the TCP/IP, which the Russians decided to change earlier that day. Because they were using GOST (a governmental standard), which is above the world quality level, the Russian TCP/IP v.6 was moving above the normal TCP/IP. The Russians decided to go back to the old TCP/IP v.4, and now all the Internet is back to normal.