No Army Can Invade Russia Through Siberia and Reach Moscow
Fully occupying the country would take 13 million troops, more than the 17 largest militaries combined.
Wendover Productions · Russia's Geography ProblemNo army invading Russia from the east could ever reach Moscow. Siberia, the vast frozen stretch covering northern Asia, is simply too large and too harsh to cross with an army intact.
Any invader coming that way would need supply lines thousands of miles long running through inhospitable cold and wilderness. After keeping a force fed and fueled across one or two thousand miles, commanders would then have to get it over the Ural mountains, the north-south range that walls off European Russia, where Moscow sits.
By the 1800s, that geography had made Russia impossible for any rival to completely defeat. Rivals were still able to seize parts of its edge, then as now, but one nation acting alone could not seize and hold the whole country. Doing so would require around 13 million soldiers prepared for land combat, a total larger than the combined strength of the world's seventeen biggest armed forces.
Questions people ask
How big is Siberia, exactly?
Siberia covers about 5.1 million square miles, roughly three quarters of Russia's land and about 9 percent of Earth's land surface. It stretches more than 3,000 miles from the Urals to the Pacific, much of it forest, tundra, and permafrost with few roads and winter temperatures that can fall below minus 40 degrees.
Has anyone ever managed to take Moscow?
Armies have reached Moscow from the west, but they could not stay. Napoleon took Moscow in 1812 and Hitler's forces reached its outskirts in 1941, and both were destroyed by stretched supply lines, winter cold, and Russian counterattacks. No invader has ever come close from across Siberia.
Are the Ural mountains really that formidable?
The Urals run about 1,500 miles from the Arctic to southern Russia. They are not especially tall, but they are remote and rugged, with harsh weather and thin infrastructure. For an army already exhausted by a 1,000 mile march across Siberia, they would be one more barrier with no easy supply route through.