What is the purpose of the "territory" configuration parameter?
"Territory" is essentially equivalent to country code or locale. This setting affects default behaviour of the database when handling the date format, as well as the default SYSTEM collation (sorting) in some locales. Note that the client locale overrides this, so, when connected to a database with territory ru from a client with a US locale, the default date format will be taken from the client setting.

It is also used by federation to determine the necessary conversions when retrieving data from remote servers with different territory (locale) settings.