Russian Cyrillic

The Russian alphabet (Russian: русский алфавит, tr. rússkij alfavít; IPA: [ˈruskʲɪj ɐlfɐˈvʲit]) uses letters from the Cyrillic script. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters.

The Russian alphabet is as follows:

The consonant letters represent both as "soft" (palatalized, represented in the IPA with a ⟨ʲ⟩) and "hard" consonant phonemes. If a consonant letter is followed by a vowel letter, then the soft/hard quality of the consonant depends on whether the vowel is meant to follow "hard" consonants ⟨а, о, э, у, ы⟩ or "soft" ones ⟨я, ё, е, ю, и⟩; see below. A soft sign indicates ⟨Ь⟩ palatalization of the preceding consonant without adding a vowel. However, in modern Russian six consonant phonemes do not have phonemically distinct "soft" and "hard" variants (except in foreign proper names) and do not change "softness" in the presence of other letters: /ʐ/, /ʂ/ and /t͡s/ are always hard; /j/, /ɕː/ and /t͡ɕ/ are always soft. See Russian phonology for details.

The frequency of characters in a corpus of written Russian was found to be as follows:

The hard sign (⟨ъ⟩) acts like a "silent back vowel" that separates a succeeding "soft vowel" (е, ё, и, ю, я) from a preceding consonant, making iotated vowel sound with a distinct /j/ glide. Today it is used mostly to separate a prefix from the following root. Its original pronunciation, lost by 1400 at the latest, was that of a very short middle schwa-like sound, /ŭ/ but likely pronounced [ə] or [ɯ]. Until the 1918 reform, no written word could end in a consonant: those that end in a ("hard") consonant in modern orthography had then a final ъ.

...
Wikipedia