Belarus's official currency symbol — a Cyrillic Б with a bar through its middle, approved by the National Bank in January 2026 and provisionally assigned to U+20C5. It is not in a released Unicode version yet, so nothing renders it today.
The Belarusian ruble sign is the official graphic symbol of the Belarusian ruble (ISO 4217 code BYN), approved by Resolution No. 25 of the Board of the National Bank of the Republic of Belarus on 27 January 2026. The design is the Cyrillic capital letter Б — the first letter of Беларусь (Belarus) — with an added horizontal line through the centre of the letter, parallel to its upper arm. The National Bank's own proposal describes that centre line as symbolising "soundness, balance and stability", and places the symbol deliberately within the visual family of crossbar-based currency signs like the dollar, pound and yen. The bank submitted it for encoding in March 2026 (proposal L2/26-089, filed by Roman Titov on the bank's behalf), and the Unicode Technical Committee provisionally assigned it to U+20C5 in the Currency Symbols block on 21 April 2026, targeting Unicode 19.0. That status matters: provisionally assigned is one step short of accepted, and Unicode 19.0 is not expected until well after Unicode 18.0's September 2026 release. So although the proposal notes that "usage in general commerce within Belarus has already begun", no operating system, keyboard or font ships the character, and it will render as an empty box or a missing-glyph placeholder wherever you paste it. Until then, Br and BYN remain the abbreviations that actually work.
The provisionally assigned character itself. You can copy the codepoint, but expect a blank box — no released Unicode version contains it yet.
Until the sign is encoded and fonts ship it, these are the forms that render correctly everywhere.
The Belarusian and Russian rubles are separate currencies with separate symbols. The Russian one is already encoded and renders everywhere; the Belarusian one is neither.
Recent national currency symbols at various stages of the same standard-to-keyboard journey.
It is the official graphic symbol of the Belarusian ruble (BYN), approved by Resolution No. 25 of the Board of the National Bank of the Republic of Belarus on 27 January 2026. The design is the Cyrillic capital letter Б, the first letter of Беларусь, with a horizontal line added through the centre of the letter, parallel to its upper arm.
Because it is not in a released version of Unicode yet. The character was provisionally assigned to U+20C5 on 21 April 2026 and targets Unicode 19.0, which has not been published. No font covers the codepoint, so it renders as a blank box or a missing-glyph placeholder everywhere.
Not before Unicode 19.0 publishes, and in practice later than that. Provisional assignment is one step short of formal acceptance, and even after a character is published, fonts, keyboards and operating systems each add support on their own schedules — a gap usually measured in months to years.
No. They are different currencies with different symbols. The Russian ruble sign is ₽ (U+20BD), encoded in Unicode 7.0 and rendering reliably everywhere. The Belarusian ruble sign is a separate character at U+20C5, based on the Cyrillic letter Б rather than Р, and is not yet encoded in any released version.
Br is the Latin abbreviation used by the National Bank itself, and BYN is the ISO 4217 code — both render correctly everywhere. The Cyrillic short form руб. is also common in Belarusian and Russian text.
Roman Titov, Deputy Head of the Cash Circulation Directorate, filed the proposal on behalf of the National Bank of the Republic of Belarus. It was submitted on 5 March 2026 as document L2/26-089 and asks for a single character in the existing Currency Symbols block.
Use UltraTextGen to convert plain text into bold, italic, cursive, and 100+ other Unicode font styles — free and instant.
Open UltraTextGen →