woodland located east of the Urals as far as the Altay Mountains. Much of the forested zone has been cleared for agriculture, especially in European Russia. Wildlife is more scarce as a result of this, but the roe deer, wolf, fox, and squirrel are very common. Steppe The steppe has long been depicted as the typical Russian landscape. It is a broad band of treeless, grassy plains, interrupted by mountain ranges, extending from Hungary across Ukraine, southern Russia, and Kazakhstan before ending in Manchuria. In a country of extremes, the steppe zone provides the most favorable conditions for human settlement and agriculture because of its moderate temperatures and normally adequate levels of sunshine and moisture. Even here, however, agricultural yields are sometimes adversely affected by unpredictable levels of precipitation and occasional catastrophic droughts. The soil is very dry. Topography Russia's mountain ranges are located principally along its continental dip (the Ural Mountains), along the southwestern border (the Caucasus), along the border with Mongolia (the eastern and western Sayan Mountains and the western extremity of the Altay Mountains), and in eastern Siberia (a complex system of ranges in the northeastern corner of the country and forming the spine of the Kamchatka Peninsula, and lesser mountains extending along the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan). Russia has nine major mountain ranges. In general, the eastern half of the country is much more mountainous than the western half, the interior of which is dominated by low plains. The traditional dividing line between the east and the west is the Yenisei River valley. In delineating the western edge of the Central Siberian Plateau from the West Siberian Plain, the Yenisey runs from near the Mongolian border northward into the Arctic Ocean west of the Taymyr Peninsula. Ural Mountains The Ural Mountains form the natural boundary between Europe and Asia; the range extends about from the Arctic Ocean to the northern border of Kazakhstan. Several low passes provide major transportation routes through the Urals eastward from Europe. The highest peak, Mount Narodnaya, is . The Urals also contain valuable deposits of minerals. West Siberian Plain To the east of the Urals is the West Siberian Plain, stretching about 1,900 kilometers from west to east and about 2,400 kilometers from north to south. With more than half its territory below 200 meters in elevation, the plain contains some of the world's largest swamps and