Vladimir and Lyudmila are going their separate ways after they confirmed long-running rumours that the Russian president's marriage was over. This is apparently the first head of state marital split since 1698 when Peter the Great forced his wife Eudoxia Lopukhina to become a nun after ten years of union. But how does Russian divorce compare to the rest of the world?

Age

At the age of 60, the Russian president, once divorced will be like 6.3% of men his age in the country. The divorce rate for women the age of Lyudmila Putin (currently 55) is considerably higher at 13.9%. The 40-44 age group are the most likely to be divorced in Russia, with 16.2% of women and 10.5% of men in this category stating their marital status is 'divorced'.

Not only do they share the fate of many other Russians, but looking at world averages, the Putins are not alone either. Almost 7% of people in their 50s around the world are divorced. These global trends are clearly influenced by the typical age of marriage and life expectancy. Countries such as Tanzania have much higher divorce rates for younger age groups, and don't record any data at all for those over 49 years old.

Divorce top 10...

Or bottom 10 depending on whether you see divorce as a blessing or a curse. Taking the average proportion of divorced individuals across age groups, and using the most recent data available, divorce looks most likely if you're a male in the Dominican Republic where almost 1 in 6 give this as their marital status.

But for some reason (we would welcome insight why) the average divorce rate for women in the Dominican Republic is 1.71%, one of the lowest in the world. Here's one theory - because this is 'marital status' these aren't, strictly speaking, divorcees as some of the individuals who identify themselves as 'married' or 'widowed' now, may have once had a divorce. So perhaps in the Dominican Republic divorced men find it much more difficult to establish new relationships.

Latvia, which also has high numbers of male divorce is the most likely place to be a divorced female. Russia does come quite high on the list - with the 15th highest female divorce rate and 28th highest for men out of 160 countries looked at. At the other extreme is Afghanistan, where just 4 in 10,000 women are divorced.

Does city life break marriage?

A different set of UN statistics, taken from their demographic year book compares divorce rates in urban and rural areas for selected countries and found considerable differences between the two.

In Cuba for example, urban divorce rates varied between 3.6% and 4% between 2007 and 2010 - but in rural areas the divorce rate stayed the same, at just 0.8%. In 2010, Egypt's urban divorce rate was 2.5% but its rural divorce rate was 1.4%. In fact, similar discrepancies can be seen almost everywhere that data is available from Panama and Mexico to Finland and Switzerland.

Another key consideration is looking at marriage rates. If countries do not have cultural or legal traditions of marriage, that may artificially bring down divorce. This UN data only provides the following categories 'married', 'divorced', 'widowed' and 'single' - meaning that plenty of individuals in happy relationships may not be counted as they should.

You can read more about changing UK divorce rates here.

Want to know about divorce trends over time? Spotted something we missed in this data? Share your thoughts by posting a comment below or via Twitter @MonaChalabi or @GuardianData.

• DATA: download the full spreadsheet

More open data

Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian

Can you do something with this data?

• Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group

• Contact us at data@guardian.co.uk

• Get the A-Z of data

• More at the Datastore directory

• Follow us on Twitter

• Like us on Facebook