Which letters does Ukrainian have that Russian does not?

Ukrainian uses four letters absent from Russian: Ґ (hard g), Є (ye), І (i), and Ї (yi). In return Ukrainian has no Ё, Ъ, Ы, or Э, so the two 33-letter alphabets overlap but are not identical.

Why are Г and Ґ different?

Г in Ukrainian represents a voiced glottal fricative /ɦ/ (an h-like sound), while Ґ is the hard /ɡ/ as in 'go'. Russian uses Г for /ɡ/, so the same shape sounds different across the two languages, which is why Ukrainian needs the separate Ґ.

How do И and І differ?

In Ukrainian И is the back vowel /ɪ/ and І is the front vowel /i/ — the opposite mapping to Russian, where И is /i/. This reversal is a frequent source of spelling errors for Russian speakers writing Ukrainian.

Is the apostrophe a letter?

No. The apostrophe in words like п'ять marks a hard, non-palatalised consonant before an iotated vowel, but it is punctuation rather than one of the 33 alphabet letters, so it is noted separately.

What romanisation does the table use?

It uses the practical Ukrainian National 2010 style romanisation (close to BGN/PCGN), giving values like h for Г, ye for Є, and yi for Ї. These are the forms commonly used on passports and road signs.

Ukrainian Cyrillic Reference

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The Ukrainian Cyrillic Reference lists every letter of the modern 33-letter Ukrainian alphabet alongside its Unicode code points, a practical Latin transliteration, and an approximate IPA phoneme. It is built for developers, translators, and learners who need to look up the letters that distinguish Ukrainian from other Cyrillic scripts.

How it works

Each row pairs the upper and lower case form of a letter with its U+XXXX code point, computed from the character’s Unicode scalar value. The transliteration column follows the Ukrainian National 2010 romanisation (close to BGN/PCGN), and the IPA column gives a typical pronunciation. The filter box matches your query against the letter itself, its name, and its romanisation, so you can find a glyph even if you cannot type it.

Notes and example

Ukrainian adds Ґ, Є, І, Ї relative to Russian and drops Ё, Ъ, Ы, Э.
Г is the soft /ɦ/ (an h-sound) while Ґ is the hard /ɡ/ — searching for g or h separates them.
The И / І pair is reversed compared with Russian: І is /i/ and И is /ɪ/.
The apostrophe (as in п'ять) is shown in the footnote because it affects spelling but is not counted among the 33 letters.