Russia is so wide it spans eleven time zones
When it's noon in Kaliningrad on the Baltic, it's already 10 p.m. in Kamchatka on the Pacific — the same country, ten hours apart.
Russia is by far the world’s largest country, covering nearly twice the territory of second-place Canada. It stretches so far from west to east that it crosses eleven time zones, more than any other nation on Earth.
The span runs roughly 9,000 km, from the exclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea to the Kamchatka Peninsula on the Pacific. At the extremes the clocks differ by about 10 hours: a sunrise in the Russian Far East arrives while the European side is still deep in the previous evening.
A single working day can’t really exist nationwide — when Moscow opens its offices, much of Siberia has already gone home.
The number of zones has shifted with politics: Russia cut them from eleven to nine in 2010, then restored eleven in 2014. Unusually, the country no longer observes daylight saving time, so the offsets stay fixed year-round.
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