ABSTRACT
Chelyabinsk Oblast is situated in the Southern Urals, with much of the region lying on the eastern slopes of the Southern Ural Mountains. Orenburg Oblast lies to the south, the Republic of Bashkortostan to the west, Sverdlovsk Oblast to the north and Kurgan Oblast to the east, and there is an international border with Kazakhstan in the southeast. The major rivers in the Oblast are the Ural and the Miass and there are over 1,000 lakes, the largest of which are Uvildy and Turgoyak. The Oblast covers an area of 88,529 sq km (34,181 sqmiles). At January 2015 it had a population of 3,497,274 and a population density of 39.5 per sq km. Some 82.5% of the population lived in urban areas. The administrative centre, Chelyabinsk, had an estimated population of 1,183,387. Other major cities are Magnitogorsk (417,039), Zlatoust (169,957), Miass (151,322) and Kopeisk (144,552). Of those oblast residents who stated their ethnicity at the 2010 census, 83.8% were Russian, 5.4% were Tatar, 4.8% Bashkir, 1.5% Ukrainian and 1.0% Kazakh. Chelyabinsk Oblast is in the time zone GMT+5.
