The Russian Orthodox Church's mission in China had an interest in translating liturgical texts into Chinese and Japanese, and sought to devise new characters for this purpose.
They would have transcribed certain syllables normally not valid in standard Chinese phonology, such as vin, gi, or reia.
However, in both China and Japan, leaders of the Russian missions eventually decided to translate liturgical texts using standard vernacular Chinese and katakana, respectively.
This approach to character formation was intended for vertical reading, where the flow of the text is from top-to-bottom, and ordered from right-to-left.
[1] Twenty Slavonic transcription characters were included in Unicode Standard version 10.0.