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Eastern Europe
Ten states across the great plain, and Russia dwarfing them all
Eastern Europe is the UN's largest subregion anywhere on earth by land area, and that is entirely because of Russia, which the M49 scheme files here in full — all the way to the Pacific. The other nine are Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Moldova. About 284 million people live in the ten, roughly half of them Russian. The label is a sore point: Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and Slovaks generally insist they are Central European, and the phrase Eastern Europe still carries the Cold War's implication of the wrong side of a line that no longer exists.
Most of the region is flat. The North European Plain runs unbroken from Poland across Belarus and Ukraine into Russia, its black-earth chernozem soils among the most fertile on the planet, which is why Ukraine feeds a large part of the world and why armies have crossed it so easily and so often. The Carpathians curl through Slovakia and Romania in an arc, and the Danube runs east through Hungary and along the Bulgarian border to the Black Sea. The Urals mark the conventional edge of Europe; beyond them Russia continues as Siberia. Mount Elbrus, in the Russian Caucasus, is Europe's highest peak at 5,642 meters.
Slavic languages predominate, split between the Latin alphabet in the Catholic west and Cyrillic in the Orthodox east — a religious fault line drawn in 1054 that still shows up on maps of almost everything. The twentieth century was catastrophic here: the bloodlands of the Nazi-Soviet war, then four decades behind the Iron Curtain, then the whiplash of 1989 and 1991. Eight of the ten are now in the EU and NATO. Ukraine, invaded by Russia in 2022, has become the front line of the largest war in Europe since 1945, and its outcome will define what the word Eastern means here for a generation.