# Is Russia indefensible except by preemptive aggression? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 8, 2026, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-russia-indefensible-except-by-preemptive-aggression/1033662 "2026-10-08T01:40:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2026, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-russia-indefensible-except-by-preemptive-aggression/1033662/21 "2026-10-08T16:48:28Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > The question is, is Russia uniquely invadable, and thus its defense policies will always lean towards the paranoid? I’d say the opposite is true. Geography makes Russia more difficult to invade than the average country. A lot of countries are relatively small. The first attack can effectively end the war. But Russia is huge; even if your first attack is a complete success you’re not going to overrun the country. Russia also has the advantage that many of its major cities and production centers are far behind its borders. So you can’t seize them in any opening battles. Russia has the geographical advantage that it will always be able to fall back and build up its troop levels and defensive positions in response to any invasion. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2026, 4:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-russia-indefensible-except-by-preemptive-aggression/1033662/22 "2026-10-08T16:51:46Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I’d say the opposite is true. Geography makes Russia more difficult to invade than the average country. > > A lot of countries are relatively small. The first attack can effectively end the war. But Russia is huge; even if your first attack is a complete success you’re not going to overrun the country. Yes, this is true. The only people to successfully conquer the lands of Russia and hold them for any real length of time were the Mongols, and since the days of the cavalry archer are over, I think Russia is safe from them. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2026, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-russia-indefensible-except-by-preemptive-aggression/1033662/23 "2026-10-08T16:54:03Z")
Have you seen Russians east of the Ural mountains? The Mongols never left. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2026, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-russia-indefensible-except-by-preemptive-aggression/1033662/24 "2026-10-08T16:59:19Z")
> [@QuickSilver](#): > > Have you seen Russians east of the Ural mountains? > > The Mongols never left True but that wasn’t really Russian yet when the Mongols took over that area anyways. But the Mongols shattered the centralized Kievan Rus polity and the Golden Horde successor kingdom extracted tribute from the Rus for hundreds of years afterwards. ---
**Author:** ![Kropotkin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kropotkin/32/18045_2.png) [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2026, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-russia-indefensible-except-by-preemptive-aggression/1033662/25 "2026-10-08T18:47:21Z")
And yet this has rarely stopped people from trying. The issue may be less “how invadeable is Russia?” and more has it been a more tempting target?" ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2026, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-russia-indefensible-except-by-preemptive-aggression/1033662/26 "2026-10-08T19:14:35Z")
Who is tempted? Who needs that misery? Maybe China, but it would sooner buy adjacent, largely empty, Russian territory than risk a military conflict. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2026, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-russia-indefensible-except-by-preemptive-aggression/1033662/27 "2026-10-08T19:18:01Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > A lot of countries are relatively small. The first attack can effectively end the war. But Russia is huge; even if your first attack is a complete success you’re not going to overrun the country. > > Russia also has the advantage that many of its major cities and production centers are far behind its borders. So you can’t seize them in any opening battles. Consider this: the greatest military fiasco of WW2 wasn’t the fall of France, it was Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the U.S.S.R. The Soviets were caught completely, utterly unprepared, and displayed stunning levels of military incompetence, losing 4.5 _million_ troops in the second half of 1941 - almost half of its military losses for the entire war. The only, and I mean ONLY reason they didn’t crumble completely like the French is that Moscow was much further away from the border than Paris. So don’t talk to me about Russia’s size being a detriment. ---
**Author:** ![DeadTreasSecretaries](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/deadtreassecretaries/32/4817_2.png) [@DeadTreasSecretaries](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DeadTreasSecretaries)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2026, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-russia-indefensible-except-by-preemptive-aggression/1033662/28 "2026-10-08T20:13:39Z")
No, the principal root cause of Russia’s militarism is that part of their national myth is that the Russian Empire is supposed to include a whole bunch of eastern European regions that have historically been distinct nations (even ones that spent centuries under Russian imperial rule). There are arguably some geographical roots to this although if anything they involve the opposite problem. Many of the economically most important holdings of the historical Russian Empire are the nations they ruled over. In many cases those are the nations that are extremely easy to invade, including by Russia itself. This is part of why even while claiming to represent the end of empires and the dawn of self-rule for all oppressed people, Soviet Russia worked almost from the start to bring Ukraine back into their sphere of influence and incorporated it into the USSR - Ukraine was just too important as a bread basket and as a Black Sea port, and the new communist government in Russia chose to reinstate imperial rule instead of trying to build cooperation and mutual benefit. The countries that first formed the EU had every reason to think that geography would allow any of them to easily go to war with another, and with mutual economic needs (specially steel and coal) would make going on the offensive too tempting. Rather that prepare for another war along those lines, they agreed to historic mutual dependence and economic integration. ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2026, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-russia-indefensible-except-by-preemptive-aggression/1033662/29 "2026-10-08T20:16:14Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > The question is, is Russia uniquely invadable, and thus its defense policies will always lean towards the paranoid? Are you still claiming that Paine is stating something she didn’t, or are you withdrawing that claim? ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2026, 11:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-russia-indefensible-except-by-preemptive-aggression/1033662/30 "2026-10-08T23:00:13Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > Getting back to the OP, Russia may have needed to be that way in the pre-nuke era, but surely in the nuke era any risk of Russia being invaded is kind of moot now? This is really the only issue. Nobody is going to roll tanks into Russia anymore. How it is even a question outside of a historic video game? Russia rolling tanks into other countries is obviously still a reality. That’s because they think that other border countries are indefensible unless the world decided to use nukes on their behalf. They only invaded Crimea and then Ukraine because they believed it would be essentially a quick walkover, which worked in 2014 but not so much in 2022. Drones are wreaking huge amounts of havoc in both countries in places far from the border. They call for a totally difference kind of deterrence. Basically, Russia has the same worry about a land invasion as the U.S. and China. Since the 1950s only nukes cause this kind of paranoia, and the type of government has not mattered much in quashing it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-russia-indefensible-except-by-preemptive-aggression/1033662.md?page=1)