Australia vs Russia

Russia is 2.2 times larger than Australia — 17,098,242 against 7,741,220 km². Russia is 5.2 times more populous than Australia — 143,513,328 against 27,614,411 people.

Side by side

Population density

Russia is 2.4 times more densely populated than Australia — 8 against 4 people per km². Density is where area and population interact, and it often reverses the impression the headline figures give — a large country with a small population can feel emptier than a small crowded one by an enormous margin.

Practical differences

• They drive on opposite sides — Australia on the left, Russia on the right.
• Different currencies: the Australian dollar and the Russian ruble.
• Russia spans 11 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — Oceania and Europe.

Australia

The sixth-largest country in the world and the only one that covers an entire continent. The Great Barrier Reef runs about 2,300 km and is the largest structure made by living organisms on Earth, visible from orbit. Around eighty percent of its mammals, reptiles and flowering plants exist nowhere else. Melbourne and Sydney are within roughly a hundred thousand people of each other, and which counts as the largest city depends on where the boundary is drawn.

Russia

The largest country in the world by land area, close to twice the size of the next one, and it spans eleven time zones. Lake Baikal in Siberia is the deepest lake on Earth at 1,642 m and holds roughly a fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh water — more than all five North American Great Lakes combined. Russia and China each border fourteen countries, more than any other state.

Neutral facts only. Nothing here addresses politics, government, economics or which country is preferable in any respect — population is the one figure that dates, and it carries its year.