The Russian Insecurities and Buffer Regions
The Russian Federation is the largest country on the planet, however, they need even more land to be secure.
The map above is an elevation map where you can see all the mountains and the oceans and water bodies on the Eurasian landmass. The most striking is the powerful insights an elevation map can provide for our personal point of view in the lens of national security. Flat terrain without deserts and bogs etc. are the economically best and most insecure lands.
The population core is west of the Ural Mountains with the biggest cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, is located. The cities are the closes to the European Union and NATO compared to anywhere else. Russia is an enormous country with deserts and mountains that separate Russia from China and India. The threat comes primarily from Europe as well as Central Asia and the Caucasus. Moscow, then needs to expand and control the Carpathians and Eastern Europe as well as Central Asia and the Caucasus mountains to include their natural buffer zones.
The Warsaw Pact is the closest the Russians have come to secure all the gaps of invasion (where only Finland survived occupation). President Vladimir Putin has described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.
The standoff between the Russians and the Western alliance is logical from a security point of view. Still, the Warsaw pact was still a landlocked country doe to the Bosporus- and Danish Straits and this makes the region poor due to the balance of transport.
Russia is today not a large technological or manufacturing hub due to the cost of transport. The economy then falls back on raw materials, however, then the question becomes: What is worth to go into the interior and dig up or cut down? An example is wood pulp. There are a lot of trees in Siberia, still, Sweden, Finland, Brazil and Indonesia is dominant in this area due to the transport effectiveness. The Russians then doubled down on energy exports in the form of oil and natural gas. This was a good strategy with high energy prices. However, with cheap oil; Russia then becomes one of the biggest losers.
In my opinion: This scenario of high defense costs and low energy income was the formula that took down the Soviet Union. I believe that Russia might to the same faith and start to fracture.
Still, Russia is today a regional power that will aggressively try to expand to the gaps to get basic security and a buffer region around the Russian core before the population decline will limit their number of future available troops.
Conclusively: It all comes down to geography.
