country info

Russian uses the 33-letter Cyrillic alphabet, many letters not having a correspondent in the Latin alphabet. Russian belongs to the eastern branch of the Slavic languages. In the Russian Federation, Russian is spoken as native language by approximately 80% of the total population. Another 30 million Russians live outside the Russian Federation in neighbouring countries. Russian is still widely used or understood in all former Soviet republics, although it is advisable not to use it in Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia. Foreign language knowledge outside St. Petersburg and Moscow is extremely poor, so using Russian is your only possible option.