Belarus, officially the Republic of Belarus, and historically Byelorussia, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east and northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Covering an area of 207,600 square kilometres (80,200 sq mi) and with a population of 9.3 million, Belarus is the thirteenth-largest and the twentieth-most populous country in Europe. The country is administratively divided into seven regions. Minsk is the capital and largest city.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 27 European countries, 2 North American countries, and 1 Eurasian country. The organization implements the North Atlantic Treaty that was signed on 4 April 1949.
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest country by area in Europe after Russia, which it borders to the east and north-east. Ukraine also shares borders with Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the south; and has a coastline along the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. It spans an area of 603,628 km2 (233,062 sq mi), with a population of 41.3 million, and is the eighth-most populous country in Europe. The nation's capital and largest city is Kyiv.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who is serving as the current president of Russia. He has been serving in this position since 2012, and he previously held this office from 1999 until 2008. He was also the prime minister from 1999 to 2000, and again from 2008 to 2012. Putin is the second-longest current serving European president.
Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music. Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and other Russian composers gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom notable for its song-like melodicism, expressiveness and rich orchestral colours. The piano is featured prominently in Rachmaninoff's compositional output and he made a point of using his skills as a performer to fully explore the expressive and technical possibilities of the instrument.
Crimea is a peninsula along the northern coast of the Black Sea in Eastern Europe. Nowadays, it has a population of 2.4 million, made up mostly of ethnic Russians with significant Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar minorities. The peninsula is almost entirely surrounded by both the Black Sea and the smaller Sea of Azov; it is located south of Kherson Oblast in Ukraine, to which it is connected by the Isthmus of Perekop, and west of Krasnodar Krai in Russia, from which it is separated by the Strait of Kerch though linked by the Crimean Bridge since 2018. The Arabat Spit is located to its northeast, a narrow strip of land that separates a system of lagoons named Sivash from the Sea of Azov. Across the Black Sea to the west lies Romania and to the south is Turkey.
The Second Chechen War was an armed conflict in Chechnya and the border regions of the North Caucasus between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, fought from August 1999 to April 2009.
PJSC Gazprom is a Russian majority state-owned multinational energy corporation headquartered in the Lakhta Center in Saint Petersburg. As of 2019, with sales over US$120 billion, it sat as the largest publicly-listed natural gas company in the world and the largest company in Russia by revenue. In the 2020 Forbes Global 2000, Gazprom was ranked as the 32nd -largest public company in the world. Gazprom name is a portmanteau of the Russian words Gazovaya Promyshlennost.
The General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) that by the late 1920s had evolved into the most powerful of the Central Committee's various positions. Seldom in Soviet history would any other office trump the authority of General Secretary. From 1929 until the union's dissolution, the holder of the office was the de facto leader of the Soviet Union, because the post controlled both the CPSU and the Soviet government. The power of the office can be traced to Joseph Stalin when he elevated the office to overall command of the Communist Party and by extension the whole Soviet Union. Once Stalin outmaneuvered Leon Trotsky and assassinated his major political rivals through purges, the General Secretary exercised total control of party and nation. Nikita Khrushchev renamed the post First Secretary in 1953 as part of de-stalinization. The change was reverted in 1966. The office grew out of less powerful secretarial positions within the party: Technical Secretary (1917–1918), Chairman of the Secretariat (1918–1919), and Responsible Secretary (1919–1922).
Transnistria, officially the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (PMR), is an unrecognised breakaway state located in the narrow strip of land between the river Dniester and the Moldovan–Ukrainian border that is internationally recognised as part of Moldova. Its capital and largest city is Tiraspol. Transnistria has been recognised by only three other unrecognised or partially recognised breakaway states: Abkhazia, Artsakh, and South Ossetia. Transnistria is designated by the Republic of Moldova as the Administrative-Territorial Units of the Left Bank of the Dniester, or Stînga Nistrului.
The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation is the principal security agency of Russia and the main successor agency to the Soviet Union's KGB. Its main responsibilities are within the country and include counter-intelligence, internal and border security, counter-terrorism, and surveillance as well as investigating some other types of serious crimes and federal law violations. It is headquartered in Lubyanka Square, Moscow's center, in the main building of the former KGB. According to the 1995 Federal Law "On the Federal Security Service", the director of the FSB is appointed by and directly answerable to, the president of Russia.
Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin-Tauricheski was a Russian military leader, statesman, nobleman, and favourite of Catherine the Great. He died during negotiations over the Treaty of Jassy, which ended a war with the Ottoman Empire that he had overseen.
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Kafelnikov is a Russian former world No. 1 tennis player. He won two Grand Slam singles titles, the 1996 French Open and the 1999 Australian Open, and a gold medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. He also won four Grand Slam doubles titles, and is the most recent man to have won both the men's singles and doubles titles at the same Grand Slam tournament. In 2019, Kafelnikov was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
The Shuttle–Mir program was a collaborative 11-mission space program between Russia and the United States that involved American Space Shuttles visiting the Russian space station Mir, Russian cosmonauts flying on the Shuttle, and an American astronaut flying aboard a Soyuz spacecraft to engage in long-duration expeditions aboard Mir.
The Russian Premier League, also written as Russian Premier Liga, is the top division professional association football league in Russia. It was established at the end of 2001 as the Russian Football Premier League and was rebranded with its current name in 2018. From 1992 through 2001, the top level of the Russian football league system was the Russian Football Championship. There are 16 teams in the competition. As of the 2021/22 season, the league has 2 Champions League qualifying spots – The league winners advance directly to the group stage, while the league runners-up compete in a Champions League play-off. 2 spots in the UEFA Conference League are allocated to the third and fourth placed teams. The last two teams are relegated to the Russian National Football League at the end of the season, while the 13th and 14th placed teams compete against the National League's 4th and 3rd teams respectively in a two-legged playoff.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation is the central government institution charged with leading the foreign policy and foreign relations of Russia. It is a continuation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which was under the supervision of the Soviet Ministry of External Relations. Sergei Lavrov is the current foreign minister.
World War I, often abbreviated as WWI or WW1, also known as the First World War or the Great War, was a global war that began on 28 July 1914 and ended on 11 November 1918. It involved much of Europe, as well as Russia, the United States and Turkey, and was also fought in the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia. One of the deadliest conflicts in history, an estimated 9 million were killed in combat, while over 5 million civilians died from occupation, bombardment, hunger or disease. The genocides perpetrated by the Ottomans and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic spread by the movement of combatants during the war caused many millions of additional deaths worldwide.
The Security Council of the Russian Federation is a constitutional body of the Russian president that works out the president's decisions on national security affairs and matters of strategic interest. Composed of Russia′s top state officials and heads of defence and security agencies and chaired by the president of Russia, the SCRF acts as a forum for coordinating and integrating national security policy.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by his alias Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Soviet Communist Party. As a Marxist, he developed a variant of communist ideology known as Leninism.
Progress M1-5 was the Progress spacecraft which was launched by Russia in 2001 to deorbit the fifteen-year-old Mir space station in a controlled fashion over a remote ocean area, far away from shipping lanes - otherwise Mir's orbit would have decayed uncontrolled over time, with debris potentially landing in a populated area. The Russian Aviation and Space Agency, Rosaviakosmos, was responsible for the mission.
Russia 
Romania 
Germany 
Belarus 
Czech Republic 
Norway 