Database of cities in VKontakte (search and correlation)?

Question

API

There is a problem. We need an up-to-date list of cities used by VKontakte with their internal identifiers.
Through the API, you can get no more than 100 ~ 150 cities at a time, and this is if you're lucky, since you have to go through all possible letter sequences (in some places up to the seventh letter), there is also a limit of three requests from the user per second ... In general, taking into account the non-instant response according to estimates it turns out that it will be a couple of days to go through the cities of the script, which is acceptable in principle, but I would still like to refuse this.
Therefore, the question is:
1. Does anyone have a database of cities that is used by VKontakte?
An additional problem is that VKontakte uses national city names (for example, they call Lisbon Lisboa, and, for example, it is listed as Lisbon on FB), which brings us to the next question:
2. Does anyone have their original base , with some more common identifiers or with names in English?
At the same time, if there is no such database, I will try to correlate what I can find or pull from the API with the geoNames database to get commonly used names, which raises the third question:
3. Who has experience in correlating data from different city databases , ideally applied to geoNames?
PS There is also a need to fill in the “Population” column for most cities, but after solving the above issues, this is already a mere trifle and accuracy in is no longer as important as in the above problems.
Thanks!)

Answer 1

VK held a competition for developers in C. There it was required to make a hint of the settlement. I conclude that VK uses this particular database.
There is, in particular: a link to the geonames.org site , and a dump of this site. There are names of settlements, their hierarchy (city / region), population, alternative names (including in English).

Answer 2

Database of VKontakte cities, including VKontakte city codes for Ukraine, Russia and Belarus in SQL dump format.
The database contains approximately: Ukraine - 746 cities, Russia - 2,505 cities, Belarus - 147 cities. Link: sauron.org.ua/post/90

Answer 3

citieslist.ru 1,167,514
objects in 234 countries, collected from VK