IIRC they put some administrative protections in place after Russia declined to give up .su – this is why we don't have .yu, despite Serbia (I think) wanting to keep it. Perhaps those can be overruled, though.
How much silly and outdated the WHOIS protocol is, the client queries IANA and only then is forwarded to RIPN (Russian Institute for Public Networks).
But again - IANA is universally queried about given TLD and redirects the query to regional body. In case of .su:
> whois yandex.su
% IANA WHOIS server
% for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org
% This query returned 1 object
refer: whois.tcinet.ru
domain: SU
organisation: Russian Institute for Development of Public Networks
organisation: (ROSNIIROS)
(...)
# whois.tcinet.ru
% TCI Whois Service. Terms of use:
% https://tcinet.ru/documents/whois_ru_rf.pdf (in Russian)
% https://tcinet.ru/documents/whois_su.pdf (in Russian)
domain: YANDEX.SU
nserver: ns1.snparking.ru.
(...)
state: REGISTERED, DELEGATED
I think it's actually fairly common to delegate, no? .io was ran by just one guy at some point (or so I've heard). .us is run by GoDaddy (but I think the US government does keep them in check).