A little light reading:

https://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stalin/dp/0465031471

Buy it from anyone except Bezos.

How did the Russian Empire become an empire, gentle persuasion? That was how the Soviet’s persuaded the Hungarians to remain where they belonged in 1956. Gently. Or keep East Germans in their place, behind that wall or the border, gently with Stassi.

But this is supposed to be a happy occasion.

It wasn’t so great for the captive states of Eastern Europe either when they were under the control of the Soviet Union. I would say the chances of them being invaded by Russia are a lot greater than Russia being invaded from the west. I don’t see any Napoleons or Hitlers among today’s Western Eurpoean leaders. And by the way isn’t that exactly what is happening to Ukraine right now?

But Russian history includes invasions, failed though they were, which covered huge amounts of territory, sometimes nearly to Moscow, while encircling Leningrad. But it’s not the territory, it’s the people on the land covered by the invaders.

Hell, Stalin was so awful to the Ukes–see Duranty on the subject–that they were prepared to throw in with the Germans until the Germans started Germaning and got themselves forty million or thereabouts pissed-off people to stay on top of while fighting the war.

Never been to Russia but I have a relation who studied there. Says for all the western things like jeans and ties and so forth, they have a different culture internally. Part may be a kind of paranoia built in by the horror, the unquantifiable horror, of the invasions.

Gallipoli and the Persians into Greece just killed a bunch of soldiers. Napoleon’s army survived on food taken from peasants–who starved in huge numbers. Keegan said that, field bakeries not being efficient, a weight of firewood was required equal to the weight of flour used to make bread. People get tired of being cold. Unlikely there were many forests left in the vicinity of villages, so you take down the houses to feed the field bakeries. I recall reading of a traveler from NYC to Boston ca 1810 who wrote to some friends he didn’t see a tree the whole way. So what’s left?

Foul the wells on your way out just for grits and shins. Young women….

Brest-Litovsk was supposedly more rigorous than Versailles.

If this is not in Russian DNA, Lamarck is a fraud. No, wait…… But, anyway, I maintain the history of invasions of Russia are a factor we cannot grok. So we need to keep in mind the rational response to a move by NATO or the EU is not necessarily what we need to look at in our planning.

The various invasions look inevitably like losers from the get-go from our viewpoint. But the issue is what they looked like to the guys with the hot idea. It is hard to know what they were thinking, but how on earth did they miss all the negative factors? How did they think their way to overcoming the obvious negative factors.

For centuries, the standard road march/approach march for Infantry under load–maybe one third body weight, has been twenty miles per day. El Paso to New Orleans is further than Berlin to Moscow but…not by a whole lot. At twenty miles per day…..how long? And the wagons? Do you have enough spare wheels and axles? Harness? Horses? The latter will eat as they go, no fodder brought forward for them, hardly possible to feed the troops. So the horses run down. Artillery?
The question is why the guys who tried it were so stupid. And when the Russians look at the situation, the fact that it looks like a really stupid thing for the EU or NATO to do is meaningless. They’ve been half-ruined by other invasions which any corporal with a map could have guaranteed would fail. History tells them they can’t count on the opposition being rational as to the prospects for invasion–guaranteed failure–and thus not even starting. If I’m right, I suspect this is the only place in the world where it’s true.

Invasions don’t work out sometimes; Barbarossa, Gallipoli, Napoleon and Russia, Athens and Syracuse, Persians and Greece, Vlad and Ukraine?

https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/minard

https://thoughtbot.com/blog/analyzing-minards-visualization-of-napoleons-1812-march