What is the largest country in the world by area?

Russia, at about 17 million square kilometres - roughly an eighth of all the land on Earth, and nearly twice the size of the next largest. It spans eleven time zones and shares a land border with fourteen countries, more than anyone except China.

The map lies about it, though not in the direction people assume. The Mercator projection, which stretches everything towards the poles, does exaggerate Russia's size - but Russia is genuinely enormous, and the more famous victim of that distortion is Africa, which looks comparable to Russia on a classroom map and is in fact about 70 per cent larger.

Most of it is close to empty. Three quarters of the territory is in Asia and three quarters of the people are in Europe, and Siberia holds vast areas of permafrost where the ground has been frozen for tens of thousands of years - which is now thawing, buckling roads and buildings built on the assumption it never would, and releasing methane and, on at least one occasion, viable anthrax spores from a reindeer carcass frozen since 1941.