Russian is a Slavic language spoken by 300+ million people world-wide.

Most peop le living in Russia use it as a first language, and many other people in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe know it as a second language. It holds o fficial status in the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, a s well as the unrecognized states of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria. In countries lacking official designation for Russian, such as Ukraine and the B altic States (where schooling in Russian was mandatory under the Soviet regime), a solid majority of residents may speak it as a second language, in addition to having significant native-speaker minorities. Russian also remains the lingua f ranca of choice throughout the rest of the former Soviet Central Asian states an d the Caucasus, where it is effectively the language of commerce, government, an d travel (despite lacking official status). It is, to a lesser extent, an important language in Mongolia, where it is a comp ulsory second language after English in the schools, and where signs remain in C yrillic. Surprisingly enough, Russian has also become the third most widely spok en language in Israel, owing to a massive exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Russian remains perhaps the most important Eurasian travel language because Engl ish is very rarely spoken throughout the Russophone countries.