Too big to govern, ctd.

Apparently, Russian leadership agrees with me on the difficulty of governing a country of Russia's size. Now, they are not giving up any sparsely populated lands, or freeing Chechnya, but Medvedev announced that they are reconfiguring the country's time zones, dropping from 11 to 9 zones, with the possibility of shrinking to 5 eventually.

I'm not sure this will help with the separatist problems, but it might increase efficiency. Hopefully, they do not go too far in this direction (China has issues because it is all on one time zone). I will be interested to see what effects it has.