Everything east of the Ural Mountains is the Asian part of Russia, and it makes up roughly 77% of the country’s total land area. This massive stretch of territory, often called Asian Russia, covers about 13.1 million square kilometers and spans from the Urals all the way to the Pacific coast. Despite its enormous size, only about one-quarter of Russia’s population lives there.
Where Europe Ends and Asia Begins
The Ural Mountains rise like a long, narrow spine across western Russia, forming the traditional natural divide between Europe and Asia. The boundary doesn’t stop at the mountains, though. South of the Urals, the continental line follows the Ural River down to the Caspian Sea. From the northern shore of the Caspian, it cuts westward across the flat Kuma-Manych Depression to the Sea of Azov.
That southern segment is where things get debatable. Some cartographers draw the line differently, running it south through the Caspian to Azerbaijan and then along the southern flanks of the Caucasus Mountains through Georgia to the Black Sea. The Ural Mountains portion, however, is universally accepted as the dividing line.
What Asian Russia Actually Includes
Asian Russia is broadly divided into two vast regions: Siberia and the Russian Far East. Administratively, Russia organizes its territory into federal districts, and several of these fall partly or entirely within Asia.
The Siberian Federal District covers the central band of Asian Russia, including major population centers like Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Omsk. The Far Eastern Federal District stretches from Lake Baikal to the Pacific Ocean and encompasses eleven constituent regions, including the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), the largest subnational division in the world. Its capital is Khabarovsk. The district also includes Kamchatka, Sakhalin Island, and the Chukotka Autonomous Area, which sits directly across the Bering Strait from Alaska.
The Urals Federal District straddles the boundary itself. Cities like Yekaterinburg sit right on or just east of the Ural divide, placing them technically in Asia despite feeling culturally European.
A Vast Land With Few People
The population imbalance between European and Asian Russia is striking. Around three-quarters of Russia’s roughly 144 million people live on the European side, which occupies less than a quarter of the country’s land. Asian Russia, despite being three times larger, is home to only about 30 to 35 million people. Much of Siberia and the Far East is extraordinarily sparsely populated, with entire regions averaging fewer than one person per square kilometer.
The major cities in Asian Russia are concentrated along the southern strip, near railways and warmer climates. Novosibirsk, Russia’s third-largest city, is the unofficial capital of Siberia. Krasnoyarsk, Omsk, and Vladivostok (the major Pacific port near the borders of China and North Korea) are other significant urban centers. North of this corridor, settlements thin out dramatically into tundra and taiga.
Eight Time Zones Wide
Russia spans 11 time zones in total, and Asian Russia accounts for eight of them. The westernmost Asian zone, Yekaterinburg Time, runs five hours ahead of UTC and covers regions just east of the Urals with about 20.6 million people. From there, each zone steps forward by an hour as you move east: Omsk Time, Krasnoyarsk Time, Irkutsk Time, Yakutsk Time, Vladivostok Time, Magadan Time, and finally Kamchatka Time at UTC+12, a full ten hours ahead of Moscow.
When it’s noon in Moscow, it’s already 9 p.m. in Kamchatka. The Kamchatka and Chukotka time zone covers fewer than 340,000 people, while Krasnoyarsk Time, in the middle of Siberia, serves over 12 million. This range captures the paradox of Asian Russia: geographically enormous, but with population clusters separated by vast stretches of near-emptiness.
Why Russia Is Considered European
Despite most of its territory sitting in Asia, Russia is typically grouped with Europe politically and culturally. The country’s capital, its largest cities, and the bulk of its population are all on the European side. Russian expansion into Asia happened gradually over several centuries, pushing eastward from the Urals to the Pacific by the mid-1600s. The historic core of Russian civilization, its political institutions, and most of its economic output remain rooted in the European portion.
That said, Asian Russia holds enormous strategic and economic importance. Siberia and the Far East contain vast reserves of oil, natural gas, timber, diamonds, and other minerals. Much of Russia’s energy production comes from wells and fields in western Siberia, making this “empty” part of the country the engine behind a significant share of government revenue. The region is geographically Asian, economically critical, and culturally a blend of Russian, Indigenous Siberian, and East Asian influences that defies a simple continental label.