Russia is the
largest country in the world, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth's
inhabited land area, spanning Eastern Europe and northern Asia, sharing land
borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, by
administering the Kaliningrad Oblast exclave on the Baltic coast, Belarus, and
Ukraine to the west, Georgia (including the disputed regions of Abkhazia and
South Ossetia) and Azerbaijan to the southwest, and Kazakhstan, China,
Mongolia, North Korea to the east and much of the south. While geographically
mostly in Asia, the bulk of Russia's population is concentrated in the European
part, and culturally, Russia is unmistakably European.