Bismarck believed that the Russians could not be defeated. Attempts at military expansion of our country were made more than once, but ended in the same thing - the defeat of the aggressor.
There was no enemy in the history of wars with Russia who would not complain about its vast expanses, frosts and impassable roads. For wars before the beginning of the 20th century, when losses from diseases, as a rule, exceeded combat losses by several times, this was an important factor.
Frost became one of the reasons for the death of the first-class for its time, but small Swedish army in Russia during the Northern War. By the time of the Battle of Poltava, Charles XII did not even have 30 thousand men; the Swedes also refused to use artillery due to the lack of gunpowder. In fact, Poltava became the logical final point of the actions of the Swedish troops, which were hundreds of kilometers away from the supply bases, deprived of reinforcements, food and equipment.
Any long campaign is a war of attrition, and the protraction of hostilities leads to inevitable non-combat losses. The events of the Patriotic War of 1812 are indicative here. Thus, the number of French troops invading Russia is estimated by various experts in different ways, but in no way less than 500 thousand people.
A month and a half later, Napoleon had about 135 thousand people on the Borodino field. The army was reduced by more than two-thirds without the general battle that the French commander so longed for. Some of the troops were left as garrisons and to guard communications.
The losses from disease were also huge - typhus mowed down the French units and the troops of their allies. Great losses were suffered by the French cavalry in equestrian composition, where a third of the cavalry had already turned into infantry by the Battle of Smolensk.
The lack of roads and the likelihood of facing a powerful guerrilla war stopped Russia's opponents during the Crimean War from invading the internal provinces of Russia, and forced them to limit themselves to actions in the coastal zone. Although here, too, epidemics, primarily cholera, wiped out much more in the ranks of the French and British than the Allies lost in all the bloody deeds on the bastions of Sevastopol.
So, for 22 thousand French soldiers who died in battle and died from wounds, more than 75 thousand people died from diseases. During the First World War, German troops, having occupied Poland, part of the Baltic States and Belarus, were in no hurry to conduct serious offensive operations on Russian territory, fearing to get out of the dense network of railways and lose mobility, which in a war on two fronts threatened to turn into disaster.
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