Preparations for the demarcation delimitation of land boundary with Ukraine have commenced.

Russian is the main language of the country and is spoken by roughly 99% of the population, but there are more than 100 other languages used by various peoples within the country’s borders.

Russia is home to the world’s deepest lake.

While still under the domain of the Mongol-Tatars and with their connivance, the duchy of Moscow began to assert its influence in Western Russia in the early fourteenth century.

Since the Chechen separatists declared independence in the early 1990s, an intermittent guerrilla war (First Chechen War, Second Chechen War) has been fought between disparate Chechen groups and the Russian military.Russia has severely disabled the Chechen rebel movement, although sporadic violence still occurs throughout the North Caucasus.

By a decree of February 1930, about one million individual peasants (kulaks) were forced off their land. Many peasants strongly opposed regimentation by the state, often slaughtering their herds when faced with the loss of their land. In some sections they revolted, and countless peasants deemed "kulaks" by the authorities were executed. The combination of bad weather, deficiencies of the hastily-established collective farms, and massive confiscation of grain precipitated a serious famine, and several million peasants died of starvation, mostly in Ukraine and parts of southwestern Russia.

In 1979 the troubled nine-year Soviet war in Afghanistan began.