Russia country profile – BBC News

Russia – the largest country on earth – emerged from a decade of post-Soviet economic and political turmoil to seek to reassert itself as a world power.

Income from vast natural resources, above all oil and gas, helped Russia overcome the economic collapse of 1998, but the oil price slump of 2014 ended the long run of prosperity.

Vladimir Putin has been Russia’s dominant political figure since his election as president in 2000, serving two terms and then a four-year stint as prime minister, before resuming the presidency in 2012 and winning re-elections in 2018 and 2024.

Putin has enhanced his control over state institutions and the media, a process supplemented more recently by an emphasis on fierce nationalism and hostility to the West. The mid-2010s onwards have seen a dramatic downturn in Russian relations with the West, with some considering it the start of a new Cold War.

In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in an attempt to re-assert Russian control over the neighbouring country, the largest conventional war in Europe since 1945. It is estimated to have caused tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilian casualties and hundreds of thousands of military casualties.

In 2023, the Kremlin unveiled an anti-Western foreign policy strategy, defining Russia as a “unique country-civilization and a vast Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power” seeking closer relations with China, India, the Islamic world, Latin America and southern Africa, in opposition to the US and its allies.

President: Vladimir Putin

Since Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency, Russia’s authorities have further tightened control over the media, muffling any serious opposition. Alexi Navalny, who was President Putin’s fiercest domestic critic, died in an Arctic penal colony in 2024.

Putin has adopted a stridently nationalist course and appealed to memories of Soviet-era power to shore up domestic support.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin has pursued an ideological campaign on the domestic front – pushing for a transformation of Russia into an increasingly militaristic society.

The president presents himself as a strong leader who took Russia out of the economic, social and political crisis of the 1990s, and defends Russia’s national interests, particularly against alleged Western hostility.

Since the start of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 nearly all independent media outlets in Russia have shut down, been forced to close, or have left the country to operate from exile.

Top state-controlled domestic TV channels have cleared their schedules for current affairs programmes spreading anti-Ukrainian, anti-Western material.

The authorities have also extended their control over the online world and are keen to curb the influence of global internet giants.

Some key dates in Russia’s history:

1547 – Grand Prince Ivan IV of Moscow (Ivan the Terrible) is the first ruler to be proclaimed Tsar of Russia.

1689-1725 – Peter the Great introduces far-reaching reforms.

1798-1815 – Russia takes part in the European coalitions against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, defeating Napoleon’s invasion in 1812 and contributing to his overthrow.

1853-57 – Russia suffers setback in attempt to seize territory from declining Ottoman Empire through its defeat in Crimean War.

1904-05 – Russian expansion in Manchuria leads to war with Japan – and the 1905 revolution, which forced Tsar Nicholas II to grant a constitution and establish a parliament, the Duma.

1914 – Russian-Austrian rivalry in Balkans contributes to outbreak of World War One, in which Russia fights alongside Britain and France.

1917 – Nicholas II abdicates. Bolshevik revolutionaries led by Lenin topple the provisional government and take power.

1918-22 – Civil war between Red Army and anti-communist White Russians.

1922 – Bolsheviks reorganise remnants of Russian Empire as Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

1945 – Allied victory over Nazi Germany is followed by swift establishment of Soviet hegemony in Central and Eastern Europe, and Balkans. The end of the war sees the start of decades of Cold War rivalry with the West.

1953 – Death of dictator Joseph Stalin ushers in less repressive rule at home, although Communist Party political dominance is firmly upheld.

1956 – New leader Nikita Krushchev denounces Stalin and launch a de-Stalinization policy, releasing many political prisoners from the Gulag labour camps.

1957 – The Soviet Union launches the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik heralding the start of the Space Age.

1961 – Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to orbit the Earth, aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft.

1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: The USSR secretly deploys nuclear weapons to Cuba, after US nuclear missiles are stationed in Italy and Turkey. President Kennedy rejects US military advice to invade Cuba and institutes a “quarantine” or naval blockade to stop Soviet ships bringing in military supplies.

After tense negotiations, Kennedy and Khrushchev reach a deal. The USSR removes its missiles in Cuba, in exchange for a US agreement not to invade Cuba. Secretly, the US agrees to take its missiles out of Turkey. The confrontation is widely considered the closest the Cold War comes to a full-scale nuclear war.

1968 – Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev orders Russian-led Warsaw Pack troops into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring, a period of liberalisation under reform-minded leader Alexander Dubcek.

1970s-80s – So-called “Period of Stagnation”, officially the “period of developed socialism” under Brezhnev and his successors, characterized by economic stagnation and declining industrial growth rates.

1979-89 – Soviet-Afghan War: Soviet troops in substantial numbers are sent to stabilize Afghanistan, marking the beginning of a bitter war. Some two million civilians, 95,000 mujahideen and some 26,000 Soviet troops are killed.

1991 – Russia becomes independent as the Soviet Union collapses and, together with Ukraine and Belarus, forms the Commonwealth of Independent States, which is eventually joined by most former Soviet republics.

1992-99 – The economic and political collapse of the Soviet Union leads Russia into a deep and prolonged depression. Wide-ranging reforms include privatisation and trade liberalisation, including radical changes along the lines of “shock therapy”. Privatisation largely shifts control of enterprises from state agencies to people with political connections, leading to the rise of Russian oligarchs. Millions are plunged into poverty.

2000 – Prime Minister Vladimir Putin takes over as president on the resignation of Boris Yeltsin, begins steady re-orientation of Russia away from democracy and cooperation with the West towards a more nationalist and authoritarian politics.

2002 – Chechen militants take over 700 people hostage in a Moscow theatre, demanding the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya. Russian forces pump sleeping gas into the building and storm it. Over 100 civilian hostages die from the effects of the sleeping gas.

2004 – Chechen militants take over 1,100 people, including 770 children hostage in Beslan, North Ossetia, demanding Russian withdrawal from Chechnya. Russian forces storm the school buildings, ending the siege, during which 334 people are killed, including 186 children, as well as 31 of the attackers.

2005 – Putin characterises the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the Twentieth Century”.

2006 – Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who exposed corruption in the Russian army and its conduct in Chechnya, is killed.

2008 – Russo-Georgian War: Tensions between Georgia and Russia escalate into a full-blown military conflict after Georgia tries to retake the separatist region of South Ossetia by force following lower-level clashes with Russian-backed rebels.

Russian forces counter-attack and push Georgian troops out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. After five days of fighting, the two sides sign a French-brokered peace agreement. Russia recognises both South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states – very few other countries do.

2014 – Russia seizes Ukrainian region of Crimea and then annexes it. Russian-backed separatists take control of the Luhansk and Donbas regions in eastern Ukraine and declare independence. Fighting between Ukrainian and separatist forces continues until it is subsumed by Russia’s invasion in 2022.

2015 – Russia begins armed intervention in Syria to support ally President Bashar al-Assad.

2022 onwards – Russia launches full-scale invasion of Ukraine, prompting the biggest East-West showdown since the Cold War and the largest attack on a European country since the Second World War II. The war is estimated to have caused tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilian casualties and hundreds of thousands of military casualties.

2022 – March-April, an initial Russian attempt to surround and capture Kyiv, toppling Ukraine’s government fails with Ukraine launching a counter- offensive driving Russian forces back from the capital.

2022 – August-November, Ukraine launches Kherson counter-offensive to regain territory in the southeast.

2023 – Fighting is concentrated in eastern Ukraine. Both sides dig in with several lines of heavily mined defences, with a series of attacks and counter-attacks at key points along the front.

2023 – In June, the private military contractor company, the Wagner Group, rebels against the Russian Ministry of Defence, capturing Rostov-on-Don before marching on Moscow, but the revolt ends after talks between Wagner and Belarus. In August, Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and Wagner founder Dmitri Utkin die in a plane crash.

2024 – In February, jailed opposition leader Alexi Navalny dies in an Arctic penal colony.

2024 – In March, Islamic State claims responsibility for a terrorist attack on a concert hall in Moscow killing almost 140 people. Russia claims, without evidence, Ukraine is involved. Kyiv says this is “absurd”.