This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Russia is large enough that the fact most needs a comparison to land. At roughly 17 million square kilometers, it's the largest country on Earth by a wide margin, nearly twice the area of Canada, the next largest, and it spans eleven time zones, from Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea, wedged between Poland and Lithuania, to Chukotka in the far northeast, closer to Alaska than to Moscow. Flying from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast covers roughly 6,430 kilometers, about the same distance as flying from London to New York, entirely within one country's borders. Most of that vast territory, everything east of the Ural Mountains, sits geographically in Asia and is thinly populated, Siberian taiga and tundra with a scattering of resource-extraction cities; the country's political and demographic weight sits overwhelmingly in the much smaller European third, where Moscow, St. Petersburg and the great majority of the population live. Russia is, geographically, a European capital governing an Asian landmass, which is exactly why this atlas records it as on-continent both Europe and Asia rather than choosing one.