this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2026
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Right, I keep forgetting Russia is still partly in Europe
Oddly enough, so is Kazakhstan! By most definitions of the Asia-Europe border, Kazakhstan has a chunk on the European side that's actually still bigger than most European countries
Some countries like Turkey are part of both Europe and Asia on technicalities. They straddle the border so they get to be part of both.
Then there's Russia, where the population is mostly in Europe, but the land is mostly in Asia.
The European part of Turkiye is still about twelve million people as well, it's not like Russia but it is still a pretty substantial number of people. It'd be the 12th-most populous country in Europe if it was independent
It's not as out of balance as Russia though. European Russia accounts for about 15% of Europe's entire population. It's a huge area, a lot of which is rural, but its population density of 27/km^2 is almost 10x as high as the population density of Siberia at 2.8/km^2. Siberia is 13.1 million km^2, European Russia is just under 4 million km^2.
Siberia is normally thought of as a snowy wasteland, but it also includes Russia's entire Pacific coast, including Vladivostok where in the summer the average highs through July, August and September are all above 20C. That's warmer than Edinburgh. Its winters are colder, but they're not much colder than Moscow.
i feel there's a big difference in how the parts of the countries culturally relate to each other, too.
Like i'm not aware of any real difficulty getting between european and asian Turkey, whereas with russia it's 1) a massive distance, 2) there's a big fuckoff mountain chain in the way, and 3) the fuck are you going to do in siberia?
It seems to me that if all the people and power weren't in European Russia, someone would do something more with Vladivostok.
Most of it is in Asia, but the part in Europe has most (75%+) of the actual people. Partly colonial population dynamics at work, partly the rest of it being Siberia.