What is the largest country in the world by land area?

Russia stretches from the Baltic to the Pacific, spanning most of northern Eurasia in a single continuous territory. The scale is hard to grasp from a standard map, because the Mercator projection that most people picture exaggerates high-latitude landmasses, but even correcting for that Russia remains comfortably the largest state on Earth, larger than the entire continent of Antarctica. Its size is the product of centuries of eastward expansion across Siberia beginning in the sixteenth century, when Cossack expeditions pushed river by river toward the Pacific in pursuit of fur, meeting little organised resistance across a thinly populated subarctic interior. Because so much of that territory is permafrost, taiga and tundra, the vast majority of the population lives in the western fifth of the country, and enormous stretches of the east are almost empty. Even after the Soviet Union dissolved into fifteen separate states, the Russian remainder was still the biggest country in the world.

Russia borders more countries than almost any other state, sharing land frontiers from Norway in the northwest to North Korea in the far east.