To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what estimate the BBC World Service has made of the number of people in the Russian Federation with internet access who (a) use the BBC Russian.com website and (b) are likely to use the website in each of the next five years.

The latest available figures are from January 2009, and estimate that the number of unique users of BBC Russian.com in the Russian Federation was on average 247,000 per week. However, we would therefore expect this number to increase.

Research shows that the number of internet users in Russia continues to grow, and that by the end of 2008 Russia had overtaken the UK as the second largest internet market in Europe. The BBC World Service regularly reviews the performance of all its websites, but predictive performance estimates of websites in individual countries are not available in this fast-changing environment.