Russia has a ton of land (with most of it being unproductive land in Siberia), but that won't help them to win the war.
It is actually more of a problem than an asset, because they must guard very long shores and borders against unfriendly neighbors. And if they decide to redeploy a unit from Khabarovsk to Ukraine, it takes at least a week to move it by rail. Probably longer than that. Not exactly a recipe for flexibility.
> It is actually more of a problem than an asset, because they must guard very long shores and borders against unfriendly neighbors.
On the flip side they can afford to give up a lot of terrain while they get their act together. And now the other side has super long supply chains that they have to deal with.
Yes, for defense, it is great (on the other side of this scale would be Israel that lacks any strategic depth and thus must defend the border regions at almost any cost).
The Napoleonic wars were yet another great example of a strategic retreat and bleeding the enemy dry in the endless frozen steppe.
But for attacking someone else, the situation reverses and now it is Russia that faces serious logistical problems correlated to its sheer size.
Ukraine is approximately 603,550 sq km, while Russia is approximately 17,098,242 sq km, making Russia 2,733% larger than Ukraine.
The best effect of Russian admirers and propaganda alike is that people think it is bigger then it is and that everything Russian is better then it is. It is also country where huge amount of population does not have flushable toilet, have huge inequality and massive amount of internal issues.
Russian main advantage is that it does not value human life and is OK with massive looses. And that it has zero ethical limits with regards to civilians. That is amount of greatness.
This comment is really weird. It's written as though it's correcting an incorrect assumption in the parent. But it's literally confirming what the parent said.
Parent: russia is almost 30x the size of ukraine
This comment: what?! you're confused by russian propaganda! it's only 2733% larger than ukraine
And then, even if you adjust to claim that you were trying to reinforce parent's point, that's not plausible either since parent was actually pointing out that people's belief that russia was 10x bigger was actually a large underestimate of its size.
I didn't introduce the 10x figure. But if you look at GDP, 10x seems about right. GDP is often used to compare countries, and that the size, and quality of the army you can field is based on GDP of the country, seems somewhat reasonable.
The GDP doesn't really matter in this conflict, since the Ukraine is essentially getting all its weapons, intelligence and training for free.
That and, a lot of the Russian military (the reserves) and their equipment (ships, subs, intercontinental bombers, nukes, etc) are not really going to help the Russians win the conflict, since they're either not useful, or politically impossible to use.
I think if Putin can sell to the Russian people that this is a war, not a special military operation, and as such, they should call up the reserves, break the law about how those reserves are allowed to be used, etc, then they could probably win. Without that, I don't think it's that realistic: they're fighting against a totally mobilized country that's being flooded with high-tech weapons. Imagine afghanistan, if the taleban were armed for free by the western military-industrial complex. The US wouldn't be able to do it. Russia almost certainly won't be able either.
It is actually more of a problem than an asset, because they must guard very long shores and borders against unfriendly neighbors. And if they decide to redeploy a unit from Khabarovsk to Ukraine, it takes at least a week to move it by rail. Probably longer than that. Not exactly a recipe for flexibility.