Russian Federation

At a glance

How did the RSFSR become the Russian Federation?

The Russian Federation did not secede from the Soviet Union; it was its largest part, the RSFSR, which outlived the Union. The Soviet Union was dissolved from within in the second half of 1991, as that entry describes: the failed coup of August, Ukraine's referendum on 1 December, the Belovezha agreement of 8 December and the Alma-Ata declaration of 21 December. On 12 December 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR ratified the Belovezha agreement and denounced the Union Treaty of 1922.

Two documents then made the RSFSR a state in its own right. On 24 December 1991 Yeltsin, still signing as President of the RSFSR, wrote to UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar that the membership of the Soviet Union in the United Nations, "including the Security Council", was being continued by the Russian Federation with the support of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The next day, 25 December, the Supreme Soviet passed Law No. 2094-I: the state "Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) shall henceforth be called the Russian Federation (Russia)". The old name could still be used on official forms during 1992.

The new state inherited the RSFSR's borders, which went back to the internal map of the Soviet republics drawn in the 1920s and 1950s. The earlier history of that republic, founded in 1918, is told in Republics of the Soviet Union. The constitution adopted in December 1993 states in its first article that "the names 'Russian Federation' and 'Russia' shall be equal".

Who has led the Russian Federation?

Russia has had three presidents since 1991. The president appoints the chairman of the government (prime minister) with the consent of the State Duma; until 2000 several prime ministers held office only for months.

The original constitution of 1993 gave the president a term of "four years" and barred more than "two terms running". An amendment of 2008 extended the term to six years, and the 2020 amendments, discussed below, reset the count of terms for the sitting president.

What was shock therapy?

"Shock therapy" was the name given to the rapid market reforms launched by Yegor Gaidar's government in January 1992. Their core was a presidential decree of 3 December 1991, which ordered "from 2 January 1992 a transition, in the main, to the use of free (market) prices", with state control kept only for a short list of goods. Prices rose at once. According to Rosstat, consumer prices in January 1992 were 3.45 times their level of December 1991, and by December 1992 they were 26 times higher: an annual inflation rate of about 2,500 per cent. Inflation stayed in three digits until 1995 and fell to about 11 per cent in 1997.

Privatisation followed. Decree No. 914 of 14 August 1992 introduced privatisation cheques, the "vouchers": from 1 October 1992 every citizen could collect one cheque with a face value of 10,000 roubles, valid until the end of 1993 and later until 1 July 1994, to exchange for shares in state enterprises. A second wave, the loans-for-shares scheme of 1995, was far more controversial. According to the political scientist Daniel Treisman, the government handed stakes in 12 large companies, among them the oil firms LUKoil, Yukos, Sidanko and Sibneft and the producer Norilsk Nickel, to selected businessmen in return for loans totalling "about $800 million"; if the loans were not repaid by September 1996, the creditors could auction the stakes. Treisman calls the handling of the scheme a "scandal", yet argues that "there is little evidence that the program had most of the negative consequences attributed to it".

Foreign advisers played a part, and one episode ended in court. A US-funded programme run by the Harvard Institute for International Development advised the privatisation agency. According to the Harvard Crimson, a US federal judge later found two of its advisers, Andrei Shleifer and Jonathan Hay, liable for fraud over personal investments they had made in Russia while advising the programme; in the 2005 settlement Harvard agreed to pay $26.5 million and Shleifer $2 million.

Output collapsed. By World Bank figures in constant prices, Russia's GDP in 1998 was about 40 per cent below its level of 1990. Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman argued in 2003 that the official statistics overstated the fall, because much Soviet output had been worthless and much new activity went unrecorded; by the late 1990s, they wrote, Russia "had become a typical middle-income capitalist democracy".

What happened in the constitutional crisis of 1993?

The reforms set the president against the parliament elected in Soviet times, the Congress of People's Deputies and its standing body, the Supreme Soviet. On 21 September 1993 Yeltsin signed Decree No. 1400, which ordered the Congress and the Supreme Soviet to "interrupt the exercise of legislative, administrative and supervisory functions" and called elections to a new State Duma for 11–12 December 1993. He based it on the referendum of 25 April 1993, in which voters had expressed confidence in him.

The Constitutional Court, under its chairman Valery Zorkin, met the same night. In its opinion of 21 September 1993 it found that the decree violated a series of articles of the constitution then in force and that this "served as grounds for removing" Yeltsin from office; some judges dissented, arguing that the court had overstepped its powers. The next day the Supreme Soviet, in resolution No. 5783-I, assessed Yeltsin's actions as a "coup d'état". The deputies who opposed him, led by the parliament's chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov and Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi, stayed in the parliament building, the White House, for almost two weeks.

The standoff ended in violence on 3–4 October 1993. On 3 October supporters of the parliament stormed the Moscow mayor's office and raided the Ostankino television centre. The next morning, as the Los Angeles Times reported, army tanks "punched holes in the Russian White House and left it aflame"; Rutskoi and Khasbulatov surrendered that evening and were taken to Lefortovo prison. The number of dead is disputed. The Prosecutor-General's official list counted 147: 46 at Ostankino and 101 around the White House, among them 24 servicemen. A State Duma commission that worked from 1998 to 1999 named 158 dead and estimated that "about 200" people had been killed or died of their wounds in Moscow between 21 September and 5 October. In February 1994 the new Duma granted an amnesty to participants on both sides.

On 12 December 1993 voters approved a new constitution. According to the official results reported by the state news agency Sputnik, 54.8 per cent of registered voters took part and 58.4 per cent of them voted in favour, which is about 31 per cent of the whole electorate (our calculation). The constitution created a strong presidency and a two-chamber Federal Assembly, the State Duma and the Federation Council. It remains in force, with amendments.

Why did Russia fight two wars in Chechnya?

In the early 1990s several regions pressed for more autonomy, and two refused to sign the Federation Treaty of 31 March 1992, which divided powers between Moscow and the regions: Tatarstan and Chechnya. Tatarstan held a referendum on 21 March 1992 asking voters whether the republic was "a sovereign state, a subject of international law"; on 13 March Russia's Constitutional Court had found that formulation of the republic's status unconstitutional.

Chechnya's was not. In October 1991, according to Human Rights Watch, Chechnya "declared independence from Russia under the leadership of a former Air Force General, Dzhokar Dudayev". Yeltsin sent interior ministry troops in November 1991, but they were withdrawn after Chechen resistance and public criticism in Russia. After three years of standoff Yeltsin issued decrees on 30 November and 9 December 1994 for the use of force in Chechnya; in July 1995 the Constitutional Court found the second of them consistent with the constitution. On 11 December 1994, HRW reported, 40,000 army and interior ministry troops moved on the Chechen capital, Grozny, and heavy air attacks followed.

The war lasted twenty months and fell hardest on civilians. Human Rights Watch estimated in 1997 that it killed "at least 50,000 civilians", about 5 per cent of Chechnya's pre-war population. Official figures put Russian military deaths at 3,826; the human rights group Memorial counted 4,379. In one of the best-documented incidents, at Samashki on 7–8 April 1995, Memorial reported that interior ministry units killed 103 civilians. On 31 August 1996 Alexander Lebed for Russia and Aslan Maskhadov for the Chechen side signed the Khasavyurt accords, which ended the fighting and postponed the question of Chechnya's status until 31 December 2001.

The second war began three years later. In August 1999 fighters from Chechnya under Shamil Basayev and Ibn al-Khattab invaded neighbouring Dagestan, and in September a series of bombings struck apartment buildings in Russia (see below). Russian forces re-entered Chechnya that autumn. HRW reported that Grozny was bombed "for three straight months, from November 1999 to early February 2000". Russia formally ended its "counter-terrorism operation" in Chechnya on 16 April 2009.

How did the 1990s end: the 1996 election and the 1998 default?

In the presidential election of 1996 Yeltsin faced the communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, who came a close second in the first round on 16 June. Yeltsin won the run-off on 3 July 1996 with 53.82 per cent against Zyuganov's 40.31 per cent, according to the Central Electoral Commission's final figures. The commission itself corrected the run-off results after finding errors in Dagestan and falsifications in Karachay-Cherkessia, Mordovia, the Rostov and Saratov regions and Stavropol krai. The campaign was also shaped by the support of the leading businessmen and their media, and by the concealment of Yeltsin's heart illness; Treisman notes that reformers that summer were "too preoccupied with getting Yeltsin heart surgery and keeping him alive".

Two years later the state's finances collapsed. On 17 August 1998 the government and the Bank of Russia widened the rouble's trading band to 6–9.5 roubles per dollar, converted the short-term government bonds (GKOs and OFZs) maturing before the end of 1999, and declared a 90-day moratorium on repaying foreign credits. "Yesterday the government admitted it was bankrupt," the newspaper Kommersant wrote the next day, under the headline "We woke up in another country". Consumer prices rose by 38 per cent in September 1998 alone. Prime Minister Kiriyenko was dismissed; after the Duma twice rejected Viktor Chernomyrdin's return, Yevgeny Primakov became prime minister on 11 September 1998.

The human cost of the decade showed in the population figures. Rosstat counted more deaths than births every year from 1992; the population peaked at 148.56 million on 1 January 1993 and fell to 146.89 million by the end of 1999, despite immigration from other former Soviet republics. Male life expectancy, according to the World Bank, fell from 63.7 years in 1990 to 57.5 in 1994. Shleifer and Treisman suggested that increased alcohol consumption "probably played a part".

How did Vladimir Putin come to power?

On 9 August 1999 Yeltsin dismissed Prime Minister Stepashin and appointed Vladimir Putin, the director of the FSB, the domestic security service, who was confirmed by the Duma a week later. Within weeks Russia was shaken by bombings. Between 4 and 16 September 1999 explosions destroyed apartment buildings in Buynaksk, in Moscow (twice) and in Volgodonsk; according to Meduza, they "killed more than 300 people and injured more than 1,500".

According to the official investigation, as summarised by Meduza, the organisers were Ibn al-Khattab and Abu Omar al-Saif; eleven people were convicted and sentenced to terms ranging from three years to life, five other suspects died before trial, and one accused organiser remains at large. None of those convicted was Chechen.

A separate incident in Ryazan became the centre of a long controversy. On 22 September 1999 residents of an apartment block saw sacks being carried into the basement; police found three sacks with a timer and detonator, and the bomb-squad officer Yuri Tkachenko later told the Guardian: "It was a live bomb." On 24 September FSB director Nikolai Patrushev said: "It was not an explosion somebody foiled, it was a security training exercise. The sacks contained only sugar." Russian officials maintain that account. The incident led critics, among them Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky, to allege that the security service was involved in the bombings. Campaigners failed to obtain a parliamentary inquiry; a public commission led by the human rights campaigner Sergei Kovalev was formed instead. No court has examined the allegation, Meduza notes that key claims are "impossible to verify", and in 2015 a Russian court banned Felshtinsky and Litvinenko's book as extremist.

On 31 December 1999 Yeltsin announced in a television address: "Today, on the last day of the departing century, I am resigning." He asked for forgiveness "for the fact that many of our dreams did not come true". Under Article 92 of the constitution Putin became acting president at noon.

What changed under Putin after 2000?

Putin won the presidential election of 26 March 2000 in the first round and set out to restore the power of the centre, a programme his supporters called the "power vertical". A decree of 13 May 2000 grouped the regions into federal districts, each supervised by a presidential envoy. In 2004 the direct election of regional governors was abolished and Putin began appointing them; in 2012 Medvedev submitted a bill to restore their election.

The most prominent businessmen of the Yeltsin years were pushed out of politics. The media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky left Russia in 2001 after being arrested in Spain on a Russian warrant; on 14 April 2001 his independent television channel NTV was taken over by a management led by the state-controlled gas company Gazprom. On 25 October 2003 FSB officers detained Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of the oil company Yukos and a funder of opposition parties, at Novosibirsk airport. Yukos's main production unit was auctioned on 19 December 2004 for $9.35 billion to a little-known firm that was bought days later by the state-owned Rosneft. In 2014 an arbitration tribunal in The Hague awarded former Yukos shareholders $50 billion, which Russia contested.

Terrorist attacks marked the decade. In October 2002 an armed group seized a Moscow theatre during the musical Nord-Ost; according to the victims' organisation, 130 hostages, including 10 children, died during the special operation to end the siege, in which a gas was used. In September 2004 an armed group took more than 1,100 people hostage at School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia. According to the prosecutors' findings, 318 hostages, among them 186 children, were killed, together with one local resident and twelve members of the security services, a total of at least 331. The submarine Kursk sank in August 2000 with all 118 crew, and the slow official response drew sharp criticism in the Russian press.

The economy recovered fast: growth reached 10 per cent in 2000, according to the World Bank. Between 2000 and 2008 the annual average price of Brent crude rose from $28.66 to $96.94 a barrel (US Energy Information Administration), and oil rents alone were worth 10–15 per cent of Russia's GDP in those years, according to the World Bank. Economists disagree on how much of the boom was due to oil and how much to the tax and budget reforms of the early 2000s; the data show that growth collapsed when oil prices fell, with GDP shrinking by 7.8 per cent in 2009 and by 2.0 per cent in 2015.

Official results of the Central Electoral Commission. Turnouts given as "about" are calculated from the commission's published totals.

What happened in the war with Georgia in 2008?

Relations with the West cooled in the mid-2000s. At the Munich Security Conference on 10 February 2007 Putin criticised the idea of a "unipolar world" and said that NATO expansion "represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust". In 2008 Putin, barred from a third consecutive term, handed the presidency to Dmitry Medvedev, who was inaugurated on 7 May and named Putin prime minister the next day.

Three months later Russia went to war with Georgia over South Ossetia, a breakaway region of Georgia. An international fact-finding mission set up by the European Union and led by the Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini reported in September 2009. It found that the Georgian shelling of Tskhinvali in the night of 7 to 8 August 2008 "marked the beginning of the large-scale armed conflict", but that it "was only the culminating point of a long period of increasing tensions, provocations and incidents". It judged the Georgian attack, including the use of force against Russian peacekeepers, contrary to international law. It also found that Russia's initial defence of its peacekeepers was legitimate, but that "much of the Russian military action went far beyond the reasonable limits of defence", extending deep into undisputed Georgian territory.

On 26 August 2008 Medvedev recognised Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, citing what he called the "execution-style bombardment of Tskhinval by the Georgian troops". The Tagliavini report observed that international law "does not recognise a right to unilaterally create a new state based on the principle of self-determination outside the colonial context". In 2021 the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Georgia v. Russia (II) that Russia had jurisdiction over the areas after the active fighting ended on 12 August 2008, and found administrative practices of killing civilians and of torching and looting houses in Georgian villages.

Why did Russians protest in 2011–2012?

The Duma election of 4 December 2011 set off protests that the Guardian called the largest political event of its kind since the fall of the USSR. On 10 December 2011, it reported, an estimated 50,000 people gathered on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow and 10,000 in St Petersburg, alleging electoral fraud; police and organisers gave different numbers. Medvedev responded by proposing political reforms, among them the return of governors' elections. In March 2012 Putin was elected president again, with 63.6 per cent, and on 8 May 2012 the Duma confirmed Medvedev as prime minister.

The government's response included new laws. Federal Law No. 121-FZ of 20 July 2012 required non-commercial organisations that received foreign funding and engaged in broadly defined "political activity" to register as organisations "performing the functions of a foreign agent". Human Rights Watch argued that in Russian the term evokes "spy" or "traitor", and that the Kremlin sought to stigmatise criticism as foreign-sponsored. In its Freedom in the World 2021 report the US-based NGO Freedom House rated Russia "Not Free", with a score of 20 out of 100.

Why did Russia annex Crimea in 2014?

In February 2014, after the protests on Kyiv's Maidan, Ukraine's president Viktor Yanukovych left office and fled to Russia, and Russian troops took control of the Crimean peninsula. A referendum held there on 16 March 2014 was, according to the head of its commission, approved by 96.8 per cent of voters; observers of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe were refused entry. In his address of 18 March 2014 Putin said that more than 82 per cent of the electorate had voted, called the 1954 transfer of Crimea from the RSFSR to Ukraine a breach of the constitutional norms of the time, and cited "the well-known Kosovo precedent". A federal constitutional law of 21 March 2014 added the "Republic of Crimea" and the federal city of Sevastopol to the list of Russia's federal subjects. On 27 March 2014 the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 68/262 by 100 votes to 11, with 58 abstentions; it noted that the referendum "was not authorized by Ukraine" and called on states not to recognise any change in Crimea's status.

War followed in eastern Ukraine, where armed groups proclaimed "people's republics" in Donetsk and Luhansk. Russia officially denied that its troops were present there; the CIA World Factbook later stated that Moscow backed the separatists "with arms, equipment, and training, as well as Russian military troops, although Moscow denied their presence prior to 2022". The Minsk agreements of September 2014 and February 2015, the second endorsed by UN Security Council resolution 2202, did not end the fighting. The UN human rights office (OHCHR) estimated that from April 2014 to the end of 2021 the conflict killed 14,200–14,400 people, at least 3,404 of them civilians.

Those civilians included the 298 people on Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, shot down over eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014. On 17 November 2022 the District Court of The Hague sentenced three men, among them Igor Girkin, in absentia to life imprisonment, and acquitted a fourth. The court found that MH17 was hit by a Buk missile fired from separatist-held territory, and that "from mid May 2014, the DPR in fact took directions from the Russian Federation". In July 2025 the European Court of Human Rights held Russia responsible for violations in eastern Ukraine from 11 May 2014 and in connection with MH17.

On 30 September 2015 the Federation Council unanimously approved Putin's request to use the armed forces abroad, and Russian aircraft began air strikes in Syria, at the request of the Syrian government; the Guardian called it Russia's "first major military action outside borders of former Soviet Union since cold war".

What did the 2020 constitutional amendments change?

In January 2020 Mikhail Mishustin replaced Dmitry Medvedev as prime minister, and a package of constitutional amendments passed both chambers of parliament on 11 March. The amendment law of 14 March 2020 added, among other things, a clause that the two-term limit applies to the sitting president "without counting" the terms served before the amendment came into force. This allowed Putin to stand again in 2024.

The amendments were put to an "all-Russian vote" under Article 2 of the amendment law, a procedure created for the occasion rather than a referendum under the referendum law; the independent outlet Meduza argued that it was "in essence a referendum" held under different rules. According to the Central Electoral Commission, 77.92 per cent voted yes, on a turnout that Meduza gives as 67.97 per cent. The statistician Sergei Shpilkin, using a model whose limitations Meduza noted, estimated actual turnout at about 45 per cent.

The opposition politician Alexei Navalny fell ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow on 20 August 2020 and was flown to Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel said there was "unequivocal proof" of poisoning with a nerve agent of the Novichok group, and on 6 October 2020 the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed that biomarkers found in his blood and urine had "similar structural characteristics" to chemicals of that group. Navalny returned to Moscow on 17 January 2021 and was detained on arrival; on 2 February 2021 a Moscow court replaced his suspended sentence of 2014, which the European Court of Human Rights had called "arbitrary and unreasonable" in 2017, with imprisonment.

In July 2021 Putin published an article arguing that "Russians and Ukrainians were one people – a single whole". From the spring of 2021 Ukraine accused Russia of massing troops on its borders; Moscow denied threatening behaviour, as the Guardian reported.

Why did Russia invade Ukraine in 2022?

On 21 February 2022 Putin announced that Russia would recognise the Donetsk and Luhansk "people's republics". In a televised address early on 24 February he announced a "special military operation", saying that its purpose was "to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime", and that Russia would "seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine"; "It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory," he said. Russian forces invaded Ukraine the same day, the start of what the CIA World Factbook calls the largest war in Europe since 1945; the UN General Assembly later deplored the involvement of Belarus.

International bodies rejected the stated grounds. On 2 March 2022 the UN General Assembly adopted resolution ES-11/1, "Aggression against Ukraine", by 141 votes to 5 (Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea, Russia and Syria), with 35 abstentions, demanding that Russia immediately end its military operations. On 16 March 2022 the International Court of Justice, in a case Ukraine had brought under the Genocide Convention, ordered by 13 votes to 2 that Russia "shall immediately suspend the military operations that it commenced on 24 February 2022"; the court stressed that its order "has binding effect".

Putin announced a "partial mobilisation" on 21 September 2022; on 28 October Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu reported that its target of 300,000 men had been reached. Russian authorities organised votes on joining Russia in four partly occupied Ukrainian regions from 23 to 27 September. On 30 September Putin signed treaties of accession in the Kremlin, declaring that the people of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia "have become our citizens, forever", and federal constitutional laws of 4 October 2022 added the four regions to the constitution. On 12 October 2022 the UN General Assembly declared by 143 votes to 5, with 35 abstentions, that these "illegal so-called referendums" and the "attempted illegal annexation" had "no validity under international law".

The war changed Russia at home. The Bank of Russia raised its key interest rate from 9.5 to 20 per cent on 28 February 2022. Hundreds of thousands of people left the country, above all in the spring of 2022 and after the mobilisation: the research project Re:Russia estimated in 2023 that 820,000–920,000 had left, and the outlet The Bell estimated in 2024 that at least 650,000 remained abroad.

What has happened since 2023?

On 17 March 2023 judges of the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and Russia's children's rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova. According to the court, Putin "is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children)" from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia.

On 23–24 June 2023 the Wagner group, a private military company led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, rebelled against the military leadership, seized the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and threatened to march on Moscow, before a deal ended the standoff, as the BBC reported. Putin called it "essentially a betrayal" in an address on 24 June. On 23 August 2023 Prigozhin's private jet crashed north-west of Moscow, killing all ten people on board; the BBC reported that the Kremlin denied speculation it was responsible. On 16 February 2024 the Federal Penitentiary Service announced that Navalny had died in penal colony No. 3 at Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region; according to AP, more than 400 people were detained at memorials within two days.

At the presidential election of 15–17 March 2024 Putin received 87.28 per cent of the vote on a turnout of 77.49 per cent, according to the Central Electoral Commission. It was, the Moscow Times noted, the first in Russia's history held without OSCE election monitors. The independent monitoring group Golos stated that it had "never seen a presidential election that falls so short of constitutional standards". Days later, on 22 March 2024, gunmen attacked the Crocus City Hall concert venue in the Moscow area, killing 145 people according to the BBC; the Islamic State group said four of its members carried out the attack, and Russia's Investigative Committee alleged that the attack had been financed through a Ukraine-based firm. On 6 August 2024 Ukrainian forces crossed into Russia's Kursk region. On 26 April 2025 Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov reported that the region had been retaken, a claim Ukraine denied at the time; he also praised North Korean troops, the first official Russian acknowledgement of their role.

Negotiations resumed in 2025 without producing a ceasefire. In Istanbul on 16 May 2025 Russian and Ukrainian delegations held their first direct talks in three years and agreed to exchange 1,000 prisoners of war each. Putin met US President Donald Trump in Anchorage, Alaska, on 15 August 2025; Putin said the "root causes" of the conflict had to be eliminated, and Trump said, "There's no deal until there's a deal." The first trilateral talks of Russia, Ukraine and the United States took place in Abu Dhabi on 23–24 January 2026, with Russia's demand that Ukraine give up the part of Donetsk region it still held as the main point of dispute. A ceasefire for Orthodox Easter, declared by the Kremlin for 11–12 April 2026, was described by Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov as temporary and "exclusively humanitarian". On 28 August 2026 Peskov said that peace talks were "currently on a deep pause". As of mid-October 2026 no ceasefire or peace agreement is in force.

Sanctions have kept growing. The European Union adopted its 21st package of sanctions against Russia on 23 July 2026, and on 18 September 2026 Trump signed a US law tightening sanctions on Russia and Iran. The economy grew by 4.9 per cent in 2024 and slowed to 1.0 per cent in 2025, according to Rosstat. The central bank's key rate peaked at 21 per cent from 28 October 2024 and has stood at 14 per cent since 27 July 2026. At the State Duma election of 18–20 September 2026, according to the Central Electoral Commission, United Russia won 349 of 450 seats on a turnout of 59.8 per cent, a figure that included voting in occupied Ukrainian territories; the liberal party Yabloko had been removed from the party-list ballot by the Supreme Court.

The human toll is known only in part, and every figure is a minimum or an estimate. The UN human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine has verified 17,605 civilians killed and 55,846 injured between 24 February 2022 and 30 September 2026, and says the actual numbers are likely considerably higher. The independent outlet Mediazona, with BBC News Russian, had identified 276,113 Russian military dead by name as of 9 October 2026, a list it says is not exhaustive; using inheritance records, Mediazona and Meduza estimated that about 352,000 male Russian citizens aged 18 to 59 were killed in the war from February 2022 to the end of 2025. By December 2025, according to UNHCR, 5.86 million refugees from Ukraine were recorded worldwide.

How is the Russian Federation organised?

Russia is a federation whose regions, of several types, are declared "equal subjects" in Article 5 of the constitution. Article 65 of the constitution, in its current Russian text, lists 89 "subjects" of the federation of six different types. Six of them were added after 2014 in Ukrainian territory that the UN General Assembly regards as part of Ukraine, so 83 lie within Russia's internationally recognised borders. The original text of 1993 also listed 89 subjects, but of a different mix: 21 republics, 6 krais, 49 oblasts, 2 federal cities, 1 autonomous oblast and 10 autonomous okrugs. Mergers of regions later reduced the number to 83 before Crimea was added in 2014. Above the subjects, the federal districts created in 2000 group them for supervision by presidential envoys.

Its size depends on who is counting. The UN Demographic Yearbook gives Russia's area as 17,098,246 square kilometres, which excludes Crimea, and its population tables note that Russia's data include Crimea and Sevastopol, "Ukraine, temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation". Rosstat gives 17,125.2 thousand square kilometres for 2021–22, including Crimea and Sevastopol, and 17,234.0 thousand for 1 January 2024, including the four regions claimed in 2022. Even on the international figure Russia is about 1.7 times the size of Canada, the second-largest country.

The 2021 census, taken as of 1 October 2021, counted 147,182,123 people, including Crimea and Sevastopol. Its ethnic data must be read with care: 11.27 per cent of the population, more than 16.5 million people, had no nationality recorded. Russians made up 71.73 per cent of the total population, or 80.85 per cent of those who stated a nationality. The next largest groups were Tatars (3.20 per cent of the total) and Chechens (1.14 per cent). Ukrainians, counted at 884,007, made up 0.60 per cent. The Federal Agency for Ethnic Affairs attributed part of the non-response to the design of the census form and rejected suggestions of "forced assimilation". The census does not ask about religion.

Common myths about the Russian Federation

Timeline of the Russian Federation

What the map shows next

The border data draws the Russian Federation from 1992; at 2000 on the map it reaches from Kaliningrad to the Pacific. Before it, the same territory belonged to the Soviet Union and, until 1917, the Russian Empire. Its neighbours that also emerged from the USSR include Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Baltic states, among them the Republic of Estonia. The conflict that began in 2014 can be followed on the map of Ukraine, and Russia's southern neighbours in the Caucasus include the Republic of Azerbaijan.