evidence: Kazakhstan is located in Central Asia (with 4% of the country (108,996 km2) in Eastern Europe[1]). With an area of about 2,724,900 square kilometers (1,052,100 sq mi) Kazakhstan is more than twice the combined size of the other four Central Asian states and 60% larger than Alaska. The country borders Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan to the south; Russia to the north; Russia and the Caspian Sea to the west; and China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region to the east. [...] Some 9.4 percent of Kazakhstan's land is mixed prairie and forest or treeless prairie, primarily in the north or in the basin of the Ural River in the west. More than three-quarters of the country, including the entire west and most of the south, is either semidesert (33.2 percent) or desert (44 percent). The terrain in these regions is bare, eroded, broken uplands (Upland and lowland), with sand dunes in the Qizilqum ("The Red Sands"; in the Russian form, Kyzylkum), Moyunqum (in the Russian form, Muyunkum) and Barsuki deserts, which occupy south-central Kazakhstan.