Short answers, pulled from the story.
Russia is the largest country in the world and spans eleven time zones. It has the world's fourth-longest coastline at over 37,653 kilometres, and by landmass it covers the same surface area as Pluto.
Ivan IV, known as the Terrible, was crowned the first tsar of all Russia in 1547. Peter the Great proclaimed the Russian Empire in 1721.
In 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite, beginning the Space Age. On the 12th of April 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft.
Soviet civilian and military deaths during World War II reached about 26 to 27 million, accounting for roughly half of all World War II casualties. The period from 1941 to 1945 is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War.
Boris Yeltsin resigned on the 31st of December 1999 and handed the post to his prime minister, Vladimir Putin, who then won the 2000 presidential election. His rule increased stability while transforming Russia into an authoritarian state.
Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on the 24th of February 2022, the largest conventional war in Europe since World War II. By the end of 2025, Russian forces occupied about a fifth of Ukraine's territory.