Russia Abbreviations

RU is the abbreviation for Russia, the 1st largest country in the world. Officially the Russian Federation, Russia is a country located in Eastern Europe and North Asia, bordering 14 countries – Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, North Korea, Norway, Poland, and Ukraine. Moscow is the capital city of Russia. Major cities include Moscow (population: 10,381,211), St Petersburg (population: 5,027,989), Novosibirsk (population: 1,418,996), Yekaterinburg (population: 1,349,761), Nizhny Novgorod (population: 1,284,153), Samara (population: 1,134,719), Omsk (population: 1,129,270), Kazan (population: 1,104,727), Rostov-on-Don (population: 1,074,471), and Chelyabinsk (population: 1,062,908).

Country Profile

• Capital: Moscow
• Language: Russian
• Area: 17,098,246 km²
• Population: 146,793,733
• Currency: Russian ruble (RUB)
• Time zone: UTC+2 to UTC+12
• Calling code: 7
• ISO 2-Letter Abbreviation: RU
• UN 3-Letter Abbreviation: RUS
• Internet TLD: .ru
• State Government Website: gov.ru

List of Russia Acronyms

The most commonly used abbreviations about Russia are RU which stands for Russia and RUB which means Russian ruble (Russia currency). In the following table, you can see all acronyms related to Russia, including abbreviations for airport, city, school, port, government, and etc.

Geography

Russia is the world’s largest country and spans eleven time zones. The country has large plains in the southern areas, dense forests further north and tundra along the Arctic coastline. In the middle of the country, the Ural Mountains extend from north to south, forming what has become a natural border between Europe and Asia.

The country’s northern Asian part consists of the low-lying Western Siberian plain and the Central Siberian plateau. With the exception of the Arctic coastal areas and the southern plains, most of Russia has a typical inland climate, with relatively little rainfall and large temperature differences. Winters are long and cold, while summers are short and warm.

The environmental problems are great after a violent industrialization in the Soviet era. A large proportion of the country’s fresh water is unsuitable as drinking water. Extensive emissions from heavy industry and radioactive pollution from the 1950s and 1960s have made large areas uninhabitable, and several forest areas are threatened by uncontrolled harvesting and soil erosion.

History

In the 1000s BCE occurred the first state formation in Russia. Founded in modern-day Ukraine in the 8th century, the kingdom became a trading center that gained control of large Russian territories. After the Mongols invaded Kiev in the 13th century, the Moscow Principality grew. The empire expanded over the next 500 years, and in 1721 Peter baptized the Great Empire into the Russian Empire.

• See photionary for Russia history timeline.

The monarchy continued for the next hundreds of years, until unrest and major social differences inward led to the Russian revolution in 1917 where the tsar was deposed. In the same year, the Communists (Bolsheviks) took power under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. A civil war broke out between the Red Arms of the Bolsheviks and the White Arms, supported by Britain, the United States, France and Japan. The Bolsheviks won the war in 1921, and in 1922 the Soviet Union was established.

Josef Stalin dictated the Soviet Union dictatorially from 1924 to 1953. Millions of people died in labor camps, were executed or exiled. The country was on the victorious side in World War II, but suffered enormous losses. In the postwar period, the Soviet Union fought a power struggle against the United States called the Cold War. It was expressed in the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Cuba crisis and the nuclear weapons armament. After several years of instability and economic decline, the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. Russia has since undergone extensive reforms and has become the Soviet Union’s political, economic and military successor.

Society and politics

Russia is a republic where the president is elected for six years at a time. The president has great power as head of state and the military commander-in-chief, and appoints senior officials. The Prime Minister is appointed by the President, but is approved by the State Duma. The lower house The State Duma, together with the upper house, constitutes the Federation Council of the National Assembly.

The regions of the federation have varying degrees of internal autonomy, but in recent years the country has become more centrally controlled. Throughout the 1990s, reforms in social life, politics and economics were implemented. The country still faces challenges such as social and economic disparities between regions, widespread corruption, ethnic tensions, and an uncontrollable bureaucracy.

Vladimir Putin has dominated politics for two decades. He was prime minister in 1999, president from 2000–2008, prime minister 2008–2012, and president from 2012. The democratization process that started after the fall of the Soviet Union has stalled. Freedom of speech and press is limited and the choices are criticized by international observers.

Russia is a key player in international politics. The country is one of five permanent members of the UN Security Council. In recent years, the country has made its mark by involving itself in Syria and annexing the Crimean Peninsula. Russia is also accused of influencing the presidential election in the United States and of assaults in the UK. All this worsens the relationship with the West.

Economics and Commerce

Russia introduced market economy after the Soviet Union’s planned economy and the transition led to major economic fluctuations. Extensive reforms could not prevent thousands of businesses from declining sharply, and poverty increased dramatically in the mid-1990s. Today, the country still faces challenges from the Soviet era, such as high unemployment and a uniform and outdated industry.

Nevertheless, Russia has one of the world’s largest economies. The country has vast natural resources and possesses the world’s largest gas reserves and some of the largest contiguous forest areas. The country is also a world leader in oil production, has rich mineral resources and extensive agriculture.

In 2014, financial sanctions were imposed on the country as a result of the annexation of Crimea, while oil prices fell sharply. This hit Russia very hard. The dependence on a small selection of export goods, such as oil and natural gas, makes the country very vulnerable to changes in the world economy. Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom and China are the country’s most important trading partners.

UN RPGs

The UN Association is offering a role-playing game for the 2019-20 school year in which students will try to resolve a conflict in the Security Council (Iran and the nuclear issue). Russia is a permanent member of the Security Council, and the sections that follow are information related to this game.

Foreign policy and relations with other countries in the Security Council

Russia is a great power and wants more influence internationally than it has today. Russia seeks to retain as much influence as possible in the old Soviet republics and therefore does not want them to become members of the EU or NATO. Russia is generally more skeptical that the UN will intervene on individual countries than the West is. The country is not afraid to stand alone in disputes within the Security Council, and is often followed by China if its objections are to national sovereignty, threats to incumbent regimes and what the country regards as exaggerated pressures for democracy and human rights.

Relations with China have improved noticeably in recent decades, and China is today one of Russia’s most important trading partners. Relations with the United States have gone up and down throughout history, and have gotten worse after Putin’s last re- election as president in 2012, and Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. The countries are currently involved in an increasingly fierce nuclear disarmament confrontation, and are also very much disagree about the conflicts in Syria and Yemen. In 2018, Russia vetoed the UN Security Council against a US proposal to condemn Iran for breaking the weapons blockade against the Yemeni houti rebels. This veto was instrumental in the US withdrawing from the nuclear deal with Iran in 2015.

Relations with the UK are poor after several episodes in recent years of mutual charges of espionage and charges of attempted assassination of Russian defectors on British soil. Russia and France are basically far apart in the view of human rights and the question of what role the UN should play in the world. However, the countries have a relatively good dialogue on many other issues. France has sold some advanced military equipment to Russia, something the US and other Western countries are not very excited about.

Tips

Russia is one of the veto powers that signed the nuclear deal with Iran in 2015. The country is strongly critical of the US withdrawing from the agreement and believes the agreement must be preserved and continued. Russia does not yet participate in the Alternative Trade Mechanism (INSTEX) which aims to dampen the effects of US sanctions on companies that continue to trade with Iran. According to the institutes of INSTEX in the EU (Germany, France and the UK), Russian participation in the scheme could be crucial to the possibility of including oil sales – one of the key Iranian requirements to support INSTEX, and to abstain from further increase in the enrichment of uranium.

Russia has urged Iran to remain in the nuclear deal, and generally has a good relationship with the country. Russia is very grateful for Iran’s support for the Assad regime in the civil war in Syria, and does not want the West to exert too much pressure on Iran to withdraw from the regional conflicts in the Middle East. With regard to Syria, Russia is playing a broker role in Israel’s concerns that Iran’s presence increases the threat to Israeli security interests in the border areas against Syria.

Russia has played an important role in the development of Iran’s nuclear program, and especially in the years following the Cold War, many unemployed Russian scientists offered their services to the Iranian state. In the West, there is a perception that Russian contributions to the Iranian nuclear program in the years leading up to 2005 have largely contributed to the program also having a military dimension. In the years that followed, Western and Israeli intelligence also believes that it could track Russian experts’ participation in Iranian nuclear weapons projects. Russia rejects the accusations of contributing to this, pointing out that a large number of companies from both the West and other continents have been involved in the Iranian nuclear industry during the same period.

According to agreements with Iran, Russia has a long-term contract for supplying fuel to Iran’s only civil nuclear reactor (Bushehr). The agreement states that used fuel from Bushehr will be returned to Russia. When the nuclear deal was signed in 2015, Iran sent large parts of its low-enriched uranium (98%) for storage in Russia.

Russia was one of the original countries to propose the establishment of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, as this was included as one of the premises for the lasting extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1995. Russia now believes that not all countries in the region need to be agree before the zone is created. Waiting for Israel’s demand that essential security issues in the region have to be resolved before the zone is created is termed “unproductive” and “peculiar.”

Russia believes the Middle East nuclear-free zone should be set up as part of the UN Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in the spring of 2020. To meet Israel’s demand for clarification of regional security issues first, Russia proposes that a nuclear weapons-free zone conference should include a separate session devoted to regional security issues. Russia has urged other countries to adopt the same position.

Together with the United States, Russia is today the world’s largest nuclear weapons state, and it is estimated that the country has approx. 6850 nuclear warheads in its current arsenal. This is 85% fewer nuclear warheads than the country had during the Cold War. The reduction comes as a result of specific disarmament agreements signed bilaterally with the United States.

Although Russia expresses general support for the idea of ​​a nuclear-free world, the country, like the other nuclear weapons states, is in the process of modernizing its military program. This applies to the Russians, among other things, the development of so-called hypersonic nuclear weapons, which should be able to penetrate any missile defense that the United States and other countries may have in the future. Russia accuses the United States of having breached existing medium-range missile disarmament agreements (INF), and blames the West for this and other agreements being either breached or revoked.

At the top of this trend is also the United States’ choice of confrontation rather than negotiation with Iran’s nuclear program. There, Russia is very critical of the United States unilaterally withdrawing from the agreement.

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