"This layout" being what, exactly? Please post a picture or ASCII code chart or reference or something to show us.

Ah, Rulemak. I see. Here's a nice picture – I'm surprised we haven't put that up in this post yet:

   
    Rulemak Russian Kyrillic layout, by ghen [2016 version].

But as you can see, this subject is being dug up again these days! Right now, I advocate the more phonetic and less KOI-8-based way of mapping the W and V keys. And I'm not sure about ё either; I'd like to see it in the position the standard layout has it in.

2016 proposal for a Russian Kyrillic Colemak-based layout (Rulemak++):

ё 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - ъ
    я ж ф п г й л у ы ю ш щ
     а р с т д ч н е и о ь э
    ´ з х ц в б к м , . /

• ё and ъ swapped in compliance with the Standard and "Student" layouts
• ж and в swapped in compliance with phonetic considerations; partially supports "Student" as opposed to "YaWERT" layout

This is a little more in line with phonetics and existing layouts, I think. See earlier posts in this topic.

2016 proposal for a Bulgarian Kyrillic Colemak-based layout (Bulmak++):

ь 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - =
    я ж ф п г й л у ъ ; ш щ
     а р с т д ч н е и о ' ю
    ´ з х ц в б к м , . /
э ы: AltGr+ ' ;
ё: Umlaut/diaeresis dead key + е

• Would it be acceptable to swap ч and х from Ghoul's Bulmak in a unification attempt (fits well visually and OK phonetically)?
• Russian э ы ё provided as AltGr/deadkey mappings

Added a critical fix for windows rulemak layout as a few problems existed.
1. It was stated as Bulmak, even though it wasn't.
2. it was missing letters in the Cryllic alphabet.

If you have already got the previous version, please remove it and download the new layout now.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7xmN1 … sp=sharing
this is the same as the old link, but the old version has been removed

Edit: new version 1/12/16 at 10:52, to the latest standards with a few letter swaps, also added new layout image in folder:

в next to б "looks" nice.  And ж (translit. zh) then sits on Azerty Z position...  I think I mistype ж the most on Rulemak, so you might have convinced me here.

Swapping ё (0.2%) and ъ (0.02%) will make no real difference, so it's a matter of preference.  I decided to stop spending time thinking about that. ;-)

We agree on the other 99%.

Under peer pressure ;-) I hereby change my "official" version of Rulemak to this:

ё 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - ъ
 я ж ф п г й л у ы ю ш щ э
  а р с т д ч н е и о ь
   з х ц в б к м , . /

I will update my layout files and images tonight and post the link here.

I have updated my implementations for xkb, pkl and vim (vim implementation is very convenient to switch between latin for control mode and cyrillic for input mode!), and edited the first post to reflect the latest version of Rulemak for newcomers.

carpalx image:

DreymaR's pretty SVG image:

Finally, I got some layout images out of Linux! Here then, is the status quo of phonetic kyrillic Colemak layouts under DreymaR's Big Bag for xkb!

NOTE: As seen in the above, I understand that there are East Slavic (Russian/Church/Belarus/Ukraina?) and South Slavic (Bulgarian/ISO-9/Serbia(Cyrillic)/Macedonia?) main language groups (and some others, West and North). Does anyone know whether it'd be sensible to make layouts for Belarus(by), Ukraina(ua), Serbia(Cyrillic, rs) and Macedonia(mk) based on these two layouts (ru & bg) with some small changes if necessary? That'd be awesome! :-)

   
   The Colemak phonetic layout for Russian Kyrillic script – 'Rulemak' by user Ghen. New (2016) version.
   Based on KOI-8R, with the notable exception of ч for H because it's quite common and used in existing phonetic Russian layouts.

   
   The Colemak phonetic layout for Bulgarian Kyrillic script. 2016 version.
   NOTE: In Rulemak, the VK_102/LSGT key is combining acute; in Bulgarian Colemak it's combining grave. Makes some accented letters easy to type.

Rulemak is really good. I've tried it for 2 days, still thinking on each letter, but I see improving. I'm going to switch to rulemak from йцукен completely and use it in pair with colemak (while I never really touch-typed in йцукен and especially not in qwerty).
Now some  data why rulemak is good. Look to the chart of Russian language letter frequency:

Data was taken from here
Don't you notice something familiar? Yes, indeed, the first eight most frequent letters in Russian are: О,Е,А,И,Н,Т,С,Р.
For people who don't know cyrillic (if they read this topic for some reason), these letters are equivalent of O,E,A,I,N,T,S,R or ARST NEIO.
Ok, enough drama, the home row of colemak is perfectly fits Russian, it fits it better than йцукен or dvorak or phonetic qwerty (dah!) or even better than the mysterious Diktor layout, which I, honestly, never seen that somebody been used. Diktor looks good in fact, but putting "У" in home position and "А" in between index fingers has no excuse. It was definitely designed under heavy influence of dvorak with its U in home position.
Then, talking about two-letter combinations in Russian, the data from the same resourse shows that first 25 most frequent bigrams are:
ст то но на по ен ни ко ра ов не ро пр ал го ре ос ли ка во ер та от ва ор
They mostly use home position letters with exception for п,в,к,л which are not in bad positions in fact.

Now about my own impression of using rulemak:
- Э is in weird position and although it is 30th in frequency by data, my impression that it is used quite often. But it is unlikely can be improved (on ANSI keyboard).
- З and Я worth to be closer to the middle, while Ж, Ф, Ц could be moved to the side. Я and З are under pinkies in йцукен as well, so this is not worst in rulemak, just could be better.
- Some awkward movements exist, what I remember is "за", stretching to й (while й in q position in йцукен is hardly better).
- I really like position of "ч", the "х" on the same button would be worse. "ь" is also good.

Overall, by my opinion it is worth using rulemak by native Russians in place of йцукен, I feel it quite comfortable as it is.  If go further and do some letters moving to improve position in top/bottom row, it can be ergonomic Russian layout.

Regarding the Wide mod/Angle mod. I decided for myself to use "plain vanilla" colemak, but get rid of the standard keyboard (ANSI or ISO) instead. Staggered keyboard is the similarly obsolete typewriter era standard as the qwerty layout inself. I'm looking forward to get the ErgoDox Infinity I've ordered at Massdrop in May and start using it. This should resolve awkward movement where Angle mod helps.
I type only English and sometimes Russian, so I do not use any diacritic marks in my typing. I've learned about AltGr at this forum :)

Some more thoughts regarding rulemak. As it is designed now to mimic colemak as much as possible is the good "phonetic" layout and it has way less compromises than the qwerty phonetic layout. Talking about improving it by moving some keys, I think that can be done painlessly is to get rid of "qwerty" symbols in the numbers row and replace them with йцукен symbols (which russian users get used to use) and that will allow to take "?" out of its position (it will be in numbers row) and put Э there.
Then, I do not think that \ and / will be much missed at russian (rulemak already got rid of "\"), but "+" and "=" may be missed, so IMO the ъ should be moved to the previous э position and =+ been restored. Another possible key saving is to combine "," and "." in one key as they are in йцукен, while this is one of weaknesses of the russian windows layout, and I would still keep them separate.
On the other hand, "<" and ">" are really not used in russian, other useful symbols could be placed there, for instance the previously abandoned "/" and "\". Other symbols that are not used in russian layout are: `~@#$^&|<>[]{}
Edit: The rulemak I installed is the Windows version provided by phly95. This one doesn't do remapping of "<" to ";" and ">" to ":" which was implemented by ghen at very early rulemak version. ";" and ":" are perfect companions to "," and ".", so disregard my comment regarding "<" and ">".

Note that all that I mentioned do not affect latin letters positions, so the layout remains pretty much phonetic.
Talking about letters movement (if we look for more improvements), I would swap current positions of Я and Ф, З and Ц. That would resolve digrams ЗА,АЗ, and АЯ. The digrams ФА(347),ЦА(262) are way less frequent than ЗА(47),АЗ(74),АЯ(108). In braces is the relative position of bigram in the frequency list.

I did my homework and red these two pages topic more attentively. I revoke my concerns regarding symbols, as I used Windows version of rulemak provided by phly95, and some symbols are messed up there (<> are still in the shift layer and the AltGr layer are messed up). Now I'm using the PKL version provided by ghen.
If chose between йцукен and qwerty symbols, the US placement should be taken because it is more relevant for computers. Cyrillic has no use for coding (except some exotic soviet era programming languages).

My only remaining concern is that I still think that letter "э" deserves better position (despite that "\" key is its position in яжерты phonetic layout).
My proposal is to put "?" in its йцукен position at Shift-7 and move "&" to AltGr (same story as for № - # pair). Then put "Ээ" to "/" position and move "/" to AltGr.("\" is already at AltGr). Any thoughts?

Are you a native Russian speaker, ckofy?  In that case I'm quite proud that you're using and liking Rulemak. :-)  It was never intended for native users, but indeed it should be better than йцукен by just looking at letter frequencies...  If you consider it better than even a native "niche" layout like Diktor (which I did not really research because I wanted a Colemak based layout), Rulemak may actually be the best keyboard layout available for Russian today? :-)

Regarding Э, its letter frequency is about 0,32%, or once in every 30K 300 charakters.  I don't think it's wise to move the much more common ? to an awful position like Shift-7 for that...
If you have an ISO board, you could put Э on the extra key between Left Shift and Z/З instead.  I think I considered that for Rulemak, but I wanted it to be compatible with both ISO and ANSI keyboards (I mostly use ANSI keyboards myself), so I used the optional 102nd key for the dead accent ´ to indicate stress in syllables.

Oops, I wonder how I got that wrong.  100/0.0033 :-S
Anyway, I think Shift+7 is hardly better a position than \.

The \ position still comes from the original KOI8 translit.