From Russia with love...

Russia =

It borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and North Korea.

• 48 oblasts (provinces)
• 21 republics which enjoy a high degree of autonomy on most issues and which correspond to some of Russia's numerous ethnic minorities
• seven krais (territories)
• seven okrugs (autonomous districts)
• two federal cities Moscow and Saint-Petersburg
• the Jewish Autonomous Oblast
  

There are lots of islands belonging to Russia: in the Arctic ocean - Novaya Zemlya, the Franz Josef Land, the New Siberian Islands, the Wrangel Island, in the Pacific ocean - the Kurils islands and Sakhalin.
Russia has an extensive coastline of over 37 000 km. along the Arctic and the Pacific oceans as well as the Baltic, the Caspian and the Black Seas. Lots of rivers and lakes. There is an opinion that Russia is covered with snow and ice. No, not at all. The mid-annual temperature is + 5,5° C. Compare with Sweden with +4 °C. The average summer temperature varies from 26 to 32 grades, but extremely high temperature in the south can exceed +50 grades. Extremely low temperatures can be observed in Siberia, Kamchatka and badly populated areas in the north.

Though there are 143 million people living in Russia, it is one of the countries with a low average population density. 79.8% of the population is ethnically Russia, 3.8% Tatar, 2% Ukarinian, 1.2% Bashkir, 1.1% Chuvash, 0.9% Chechen, 0.8% Armenian. The remaining 10.3% includes those who did not specify their ethnicity as well as (in alphabetical order) Assyrians, Avars, Azeris, Belorussians, Bulgarians, Buryats, Chinese, Cossacks, Estonians, Evenks, Finns, Georgians, Germans, Greeks, Ingushes, Inuit, Jews, Kalmyks, Karelians, Kazakhs, Koreans, Kyrgyz, Lithuanians, Latvians, Maris, Mongolians, Mordvins, Nenetses, Ossetians, Poles, Romanians, Tajiks, Tuvans, Turkmen, Udmurts, Uzbeks, Yakutz, and others. There are 13 cities in Russia with more than one million inhabitants. The largest are Moscow which is the capital of the Russian Federation (10.342.151) and Saint-Petersburg (4.661.219). Then come Novosibirsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg and others.

The official state language is Russia but there are some variations of the language with Ukrainian, Kazakh, and other roots native to Russian. The dominant religion in the Russian Federation is Russia Orthodoxy. There are also Islam, Protestant churches, Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Buddhism.