The changes are being made in an effort to adapt Russia's telecommunications standards to those of Europe. The next step in this process will be to combine the existing separate emergency numbers for fire and police to a single emergency number 112.

Within Russia, the number 0 will then be freed up for use for long-distance calls, while 00 will be used for international calls, replacing the numbers 8 and 810, respectively.

A transition period has been instituted during which both the old area codes beginning with 0 and the new ones beginning with 4 will work to place calls. This transition period begins December 1 and will end on January 31, 2006.

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