Russia is governed from Moscow and ends only at the Pacific

Russia is the state whose capital stands in Europe and whose land does not stop there. Moscow lies west of the Urals. Beyond the range begins the territory that carries the state to the Pacific. Draw only the European capital and you have drawn the smaller part of the map.

The Urals are a convention about continents, not a state border. West of them sit Moscow, the older pattern of settlement and most of the European neighbours. East of them sit Siberia and the Far East, the same laws, the same state language, a different clock. The constitution describes a federation. Republics may keep their own languages beside Russian. The political centre remains the capital on the European side of the range. The land answers to that city farther than any European school map reaches.

Moscow stands west of the Urals

Russia covers 17,098,242 square kilometres and has a population of 143,513,328. The capital is Moscow. Russian is the state language. The ruble is the currency of the central bank. Those figures describe a state whose seat of government stands on the smaller, western portion of the land. The greater portion lies east of the Urals, in Siberia and on the Pacific, out to Vladivostok. Kaliningrad on the Baltic and Kamchatka do not share a clock. The state tolerates that, because it does not make the clock a condition of belonging.

Europe, as a label, therefore fits the seat of government and the western borderlands, not the shape of the state. TerraTally files Russia under Europe because the capital and the political core are there. The coasts tell a wider story. The state reaches the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Arctic Ocean and the Pacific. None of those coasts cancels the others. Together they show Moscow as a city on one side of a much larger country.

Siberia is the same state

Siberia is not a colony parked beside Russia and not a second country waiting its turn. It is the greater part of the same territory, more thinly settled than the west, with its own republics and regions, under the same constitutional roof. The Far East carries that land on to the border with China, Mongolia and North Korea. Vladivostok is a Russian port on the Pacific, not an outpost of some other power. Distance does not change the flag.

Thin settlement is not emptiness in law. Where fewer people occupy more land, administration becomes a question of distance, rivers and the railway, not of a second centre that would replace Moscow. Resources, ports and bases lie far from the capital and remain assigned to it. The Urals explain where the continental convention flips. They do not explain where the state flips.

The Urals explain where Europe stops on the map. They do not explain where this state stops.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

Exclave, neighbours and Crimea

The land neighbours include Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China and North Korea. That is not a closed European row. It is a chain from the North Atlantic to the Pacific, with the Caucasus as a seam of its own. Kaliningrad sits apart from that chain on the Baltic, between Poland and Lithuania, with no land connection to the rest of Russia. The exclave is Russian territory and still linked to the core only through other states or by sea.

The land border with Ukraine is politically contested. That does not move the Crimean peninsula. Crimea remains Ukrainian territory. Describe Russia's Black Sea coast and you are describing the coast that is not in dispute, not Sevastopol as a Russian port. A state of this extent has enough real coasts that its size does not depend on assigning it a peninsula that belongs to Ukraine. The size lies east of Moscow, not in Crimea.

Telling Russia from Moscow is right, as long as the telling continues east. The Urals are a fold in the map of continents. The state is the territory that crosses that fold and does not stop being Russia at the Pacific.