encompasses six federal constituent entities of the Russian Federation: Chelyabinsk Region, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area, Kurgan Region, Sverdlovsk Region, Tyumen Region, and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Area. The district’s administrative centre is the city of Yekaterinburg.
The Urals Federal District has an area of 1,788.9 thousand square kilometres (10.5% of Russia’s territory) and a population of 12.6 million people (8.6% of the nation’s inhabitants).
A considerable portion of the district is located in the West Siberian Plains, with the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains located in the west. The district’s main artery is the Ob River, whose chief tributary is the Irtysh River. The UFD’s territory includes shorelines on the Arctic Ocean.
The Urals Federal District has large mineral deposits. Oil and gas deposits have been surveyed and exploited in the Khanty-Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Areas, pertaining to the Western Siberian Oil and Gas Province, which contains 66.7% of the Russian Federation’s oil reserves (6% of global reserves) and 77.8% of the Russian Federation’s natural gas reserves (26% of global reserves). There is potential for harvesting over 50 million cubic metres of wood from the district.
The UFD is rich in reserves of other mineral resources, including iron and copper ore, bauxite, asbestos, talc, marble, gold, and platinum, as well as precious and semiprecious stones.
The fuel and energy complex, metallurgy and its raw materials, mechanical engineering and high technologies, the nuclear sector, the defence industry, agriculture, and transportation (railroads and pipelines) play a leading role in the district’s economy.