Total area: 17,075,200 sq km (6,592,735 sq mi)
Population (2009 est.): 140,041,247
Capital and largest city (2003 est.): Moscow - 10,672,000 (metro. area)
Other large cities: St. Petersburg - 4,582,300; Novosibirsk - 1,395,500; Nizhny Novgorod - 1,340,900; Yekaterinburg - 1,256,600; Samara - 1,146,800; Kazan - 1,113,600; Ufa - 1,096,600; Chelyabinsk - 1,080,000; Perm - 998,800; Volgograd - 984,200
Currency: Russian ruble (RUR)
Languages: Russian, many minority languages
Religions: Russian Orthodox 15%20%, other Christian 2%, Islam 10%15%
Time zones:
Kaliningrad: GMT+2, DST: GMT+3
Moscow, St Petersburg, Astrakhan: GMT+3, DST: GMT+4
Izhevsk and Samara: GMT+4, DST: GMT+5
Perm, Ekaterinburg, Surgut: GMT+5, DST: GMT+6
Omsk and Novosibirsk: GMT+6, DST: GMT+7
Abakan, Norilsk, Tura: GMT+7, DST: GMT+8
Bratsk, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude: GMT+8, DST: GMT+9
Mirnyy, Tynda, Yakutsk: GMT+9, DST: GMT+10
Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Yuzhno- Sakhalinsk: GMT+10, DST: GMT+11
Magadan, Chirskiy: GMT+11, DST: GMT+12
Anadyr, Petropavlosk-Kamchatskiy: GMT+12, DST: GMT+13
DST starts on last Sunday in March and ends on last Sunday in October in all time zones above
Electricity: AC 230V/50Hz; European plugs with two round pins
Russia (or Russian Federation) is a large country in northern Eurasia, occupying most of the eastern Europe and north Asia. It stretches from the Baltic Sea in the west to the the Pacific Ocean in the east and from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Black Sea, the Caucasus, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China to the south. Russia borders 14 countries: Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China and North Korea. It also has maritime borders with the United States (by the Bering Strait) and Japan (by the Sea of Okhotsk).
Russia is the world's largest country and ninth most populous. The border between European Russia and its Asian parts (Siberia and the Russian Far East) is marked by the Ural Mountains, the Ural River and the Manych Depression.
There are 40 National Parks and 101 nature reserves in Russia. UNESCO has included 23 Russian places in its list of World Heritage Sites and 40 sites in the World Network of Biosphere Reserves.
