> In 99% of the cases, it is pronounced exactly as it is written.
That's decidedly not true for Russian, although a native speaker might not notice it quite so readily. But, firstly, there's akanie and ikanie for unstressed vowels. Then consider e.g. pervasive devoicing of voiced consonants at the end of the word and before unvoiced consonants; basically every word that ends with "-b", "-d", "-g", "-z" is not spelled as it is pronounced. Then there's the mess with spelling vowels after sibilants, with spellings like "ци" and "ща" being literally the opposite wrt hard/soft consonant distinction. And then there are phonemes which aren't even usually acknowledged as such nor reflected in spelling, such as fricative "г" (which is normative for some words even in the standard / Moscow dialect), or the voiced counterpart of "щ".
I'll grant you that it's way better than English or French! Reading is mostly not a problem in practice because, while not phonemic, the mapping is still highly consistent. OTOH spelling a Russian word based on hearing it is much harder than in languages with truly mostly phonemic spelling such as Serbian or Finnish; take a look at this: https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/
That's decidedly not true for Russian, although a native speaker might not notice it quite so readily. But, firstly, there's akanie and ikanie for unstressed vowels. Then consider e.g. pervasive devoicing of voiced consonants at the end of the word and before unvoiced consonants; basically every word that ends with "-b", "-d", "-g", "-z" is not spelled as it is pronounced. Then there's the mess with spelling vowels after sibilants, with spellings like "ци" and "ща" being literally the opposite wrt hard/soft consonant distinction. And then there are phonemes which aren't even usually acknowledged as such nor reflected in spelling, such as fricative "г" (which is normative for some words even in the standard / Moscow dialect), or the voiced counterpart of "щ".
I'll grant you that it's way better than English or French! Reading is mostly not a problem in practice because, while not phonemic, the mapping is still highly consistent. OTOH spelling a Russian word based on hearing it is much harder than in languages with truly mostly phonemic spelling such as Serbian or Finnish; take a look at this: https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/