Three sovereign countries begin with the letter R: Romania, Russia and Rwanda. A fourth has an official name that starts with R — the Republic of the Congo — but it is filed under C in essentially every standard list, in the same way its larger neighbour is.
Russia is in a category of one
- Capital: Moscow
- Area: about 17.1 million km²
- Population: roughly 144 million
- Land neighbours: fourteen
- Time zones: eleven
Russia is not merely the largest country in the world; it is larger than the second and third largest combined, and it covers something like an eighth of all the inhabited land on Earth. It spans eleven time zones, so that when the working day is beginning in Kaliningrad it is already ending in Kamchatka. Its fourteen land neighbours are matched only by China.
The internal geography is dominated by one boundary and one asymmetry. The Ural Mountains conventionally divide European from Asian Russia; roughly three-quarters of the population lives on the European side, which is about a quarter of the territory. East of the Urals, Siberia holds enormous mineral and hydrocarbon wealth, Lake Baikal — the deepest lake on the planet and the largest by volume of fresh water — and vast areas of permafrost that make construction and transport structurally difficult.
Russia also holds the world's most consequential exclave: Kaliningrad, on the Baltic between Poland and Lithuania, separated from the rest of the country by other states' territory. And along its Arctic coast lies the Northern Sea Route, a passage whose commercial viability has been rising as sea ice retreats. Our Russia country guide covers the regions in more detail.
Romania: a Latin language surrounded by Slavic ones
- Capital: Bucharest
- Area: about 238,400 km²
- Population: roughly 19 million
- Neighbours: five — Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Ukraine and Moldova
Romania's defining oddity is linguistic. Romanian is a Romance language — descended from the Latin of the Roman province of Dacia — spoken in a region otherwise dominated by Slavic and Hungarian speakers. That survival across nearly two millennia, through the migrations and empires that swept the lower Danube, is one of the more remarkable linguistic continuities in Europe, and the country's name means simply "land of the Romans".
Physically, Romania is arranged around the Carpathian arc, which curves through the middle of the country and encloses the Transylvanian plateau. Outside the arc lie the plains of Wallachia to the south and Moldavia to the east. The Danube forms most of the southern border and then, at the Black Sea, spreads into the Danube Delta — the largest and best-preserved river delta in Europe, a UNESCO site and a major bird habitat. Romania also retains some of Europe's largest remaining tracts of old-growth forest and the continent's biggest populations of brown bears and wolves outside Russia.
The modern state was assembled from the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, united in 1859, with Transylvania added after the First World War. That last transfer, from Hungary, is the same Trianon settlement that still colours relations between the two countries.
Romania's relationship with Moldova next door is closer still: the two share a language, and much of present-day Moldova was Romanian territory between the world wars. That history is why the two states are sometimes discussed as candidates for unification, and why a large number of Moldovans hold Romanian citizenship. It also means Romania has a land border with a country that speaks its own language on the other side — a rarity in Europe outside the German- and Dutch-speaking areas.
Rwanda: a thousand hills, and a great deal of people on them
- Capital: Kigali
- Area: about 26,300 km²
- Population: roughly 14 million
- Neighbours: four — Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Rwanda is small, landlocked, mountainous and the most densely populated country on mainland Africa — well over 500 people per square kilometre, a figure comparable to India's and achieved almost entirely on hillsides. Its nickname, the land of a thousand hills, is a fair description: very little of the country is flat, and terraced agriculture climbs the slopes almost everywhere.
The country sits astride a continental divide of real significance. Water falling on one side of Rwanda's western ridge drains to the Congo and the Atlantic; water on the other side drains toward the Nile and the Mediterranean. Some of the streams in Nyungwe Forest are counted among the contenders for the most distant headwaters of the Nile. The Virunga volcanoes on the northern border hold the mountain gorilla population shared with Uganda and the DRC, now the basis of a high-value, tightly limited tourism industry.
Rwanda's recent history is inseparable from the 1994 genocide, in which roughly 800,000 people, overwhelmingly Tutsi, were killed in about a hundred days. The reconstruction since — rapid economic growth, one of the lowest corruption rankings in Africa, near-universal health insurance, and a government widely criticised for its restrictions on political opposition and press freedom — makes it one of the most discussed and most contested development records on the continent.
Three R countries, wildly different scales
Set side by side, the letter R spans nearly the full range of what a country can be:
- Area: Russia is roughly 650 times the size of Rwanda. You could fit Rwanda into Russia more than 600 times over.
- Density: Rwanda has well over 500 people per km²; Russia has about 8. That is a difference of nearly two orders of magnitude between two members of the same letter.
- Coastline: Russia has the longest coastline of any country after Canada. Rwanda has none, and Romania's is a short Black Sea frontage.
- Language family: Slavic, Romance and Bantu respectively — three unrelated families for three countries.
- Neighbours: fourteen for Russia, five for Romania, four for Rwanda — and Rwanda's four include the country with which it has had the most consequential cross-border involvement of the last thirty years, in eastern Congo.
Rwanda and Burundi: near-twins with different records
The most instructive comparison for Rwanda is not with the other R countries but with Burundi, immediately to its south — because the two are close to identical on paper and have diverged in practice.
- Size: Rwanda about 26,300 km², Burundi about 27,800 km². Populations of roughly 14 million and 13 million. Both landlocked, both hilly, both among the most densely populated countries in Africa.
- History: both were pre-colonial kingdoms, both were administered together as Ruanda-Urundi under German and then Belgian rule, and both became independent in 1962. Both have the same Hutu, Tutsi and Twa population categories, and both suffered mass ethnic violence in the twentieth century.
- Divergence: Rwanda's post-1994 economic growth, urban development in Kigali and administrative reform have been rapid enough to make it a standard reference point in development debates. Burundi's have not; it remains among the poorest countries in the world by income per head, with a long civil war ending only in the 2000s.
Because the geography and the colonial inheritance are so nearly identical, the pair is often used to argue that governance rather than endowment explains the gap — an argument that cuts both ways, since Rwanda's record includes the authoritarian controls its critics point to. What is not in dispute is that two countries with the same hills, the same rainfall, the same landlocked position and the same borders can end up a long way apart.
The Congo that could have been an R country
The Republic of the Congo — Congo-Brazzaville — has an official name beginning with R, and it is a genuinely separate country from the Democratic Republic of the Congo across the river. It is filed under C everywhere, because its short name is simply Congo.
The two Congos produce one of the more remarkable facts in political geography: Brazzaville and Kinshasa sit facing each other across the Congo River, roughly 10 km apart, and are the closest pair of capital cities of two different countries anywhere in the world apart from Rome and Vatican City. Our Republic of the Congo guide covers the smaller of the two.
R names no longer on the map
- Rhodesia — the unrecognised state that became Zimbabwe in 1980, and before that the colonial name for both Zambia and Zimbabwe.
- The Russian Empire, and then the Russian SFSR within the Soviet Union — the latter being the same territory as today's Russia under a different constitutional roof.
- The Republic of Texas — sovereign from 1836 to 1845.
- Rus' — the medieval polity centred on Kyiv from which Russia, Belarus and Ukraine all trace descent, and over whose legacy they still argue.
R is thin for a straightforward reason: it is well supplied in European vocabulary but the R-initial names that existed were mostly regional or dynastic — Rhodesia after a person, Rus' after a people, Rumelia and Ruthenia after regions — and those are precisely the kinds of names that unification and decolonisation removed. What survived are two names describing peoples and one describing Romans. For a letter that went the other way, see the twenty-five countries beginning with S.