Curated playlist
States and territories established in 1991
- UzbekistanUzbekistan sits at the very center of the world's largest landmass, and it touches no ocean, no sea, and no coast of any kind. Stranger still, every country that borders it is itself landlocked. That makes Uzbekistan one of only two places…
- KuwaitKuwait sits at the head of the Persian Gulf, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have built their delta for thousands of years. This small country on the northeastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula holds roughly 10 percent of the world's…
- LatviaLatvia covers 64,573 square kilometres on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, yet its population numbers only 1.83 million people. It is one of three Baltic states, sitting between Estonia to the north and Lithuania to the south, with…
- TajikistanTajikistan sits wedged between Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and China, a landlocked country where more than 90% of the land is mountain. The capital, Dushanbe, was once a mountain town of roughly 1,000 residents; today it holds…
- TurkmenistanTurkmenistan sits at the center of one of history's great crossroads. Bordered by Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and the Caspian Sea, this landlocked nation in Central Asia has served as a passage for empires for thousands of…
- MoldovaMoldova is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, with an area of 33,843 square kilometres and a population of about 2.38 million people. It is bordered by Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east, and south. Yet a strip of its…
- KazakhstanKazakhstan is the largest landlocked country on Earth, a place where you can stand west of the Ural River in Europe, then travel east into Asia without leaving the same nation. Spread across 2,700,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of…
- Georgia (country)Georgia sits at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and West Asia, a country of 3.9 million people whose language bears no relation to any other language family on earth. Georgians call their homeland Sakartvelo, a name rooted in the ancient…
- South OssetiaSouth Ossetia sits in a narrow fold of the Caucasus Mountains, covering just 3,900 square kilometres and home to just over 56,500 people. Yet this small territory has been a flashpoint for wars, a bone of contention between Russia and…
- AzerbaijanAzerbaijan sits at a crossroads so ancient and contested that even its name carries the echoes of a Persian satrap from the age of Alexander the Great. The name derives from Atropates, a governor reinstated under Alexander whose name meant…
- EstoniaEstonia, officially the Republic of Estonia, sits at the edge of Northern Europe where the Baltic Sea meets the Gulf of Finland. Its territory spans a mainland, two large islands called Saaremaa and Hiiumaa, and over 2,300 smaller islands…
- RussiaRussia spans eleven time zones. No other country on Earth does. Its borders touch fourteen nations, its coastline is the world's fourth-longest at over 37,653 kilometres, and by landmass it covers the same surface area as the dwarf planet…
- BelarusBelarus sits at the crossroads of Eastern Europe, a landlocked country of 9.1 million people spanning 207,600 square kilometres, bordered by Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. Its name carries centuries of contested meaning:…
- UkraineUkraine covers 603,628 square kilometres of Eastern Europe, making it the second-largest country on the continent after Russia. It holds a population estimated at 32.3 million in 2026, a figure that has fallen dramatically from a peak of…
- CroatiaCroatia sits at the edge of the Adriatic Sea, a country of over a thousand islands and islets, where the water shifts from turquoise to mint green over limestone cascades at Plitvice Lakes. That coastline, those islands, and the mountains…
- SloveniaSlovenia sits at the crossroads of four of Europe's great geographic worlds: the Alps, the Mediterranean, the Pannonian Plain, and the Dinaric mountains. A country of just over two million people, it packs into 20,271 square kilometers a…