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| Feb 7. 2022
USSIA’S MILITARY build-up on the Ukrainian border has sparked a new field of inquiry: invasionology. If Russia invades, as America and Britain believe is likely, when will it do so? Many factors are in play, from the timing of Russia-Belarus exercises, which begin formally on February 10th, to the Winter Olympics in China (Xi Jinping is said to have asked Vladimir Putin not to spoil his big event), which conclude ten days later. But one widely discussed constraint is weather. In January the Biden administration reportedly asked meteorologists to study weather conditions in the region. Does Mr Putin need to attack before Ukraine’s ground thaws in March or April, rendering it impassable to his tanks?
Weather, terrain and war in eastern Europe are so tightly interwoven that the concept has a dedicated Russian word. Rasputitsa, literally “time without roads”, refers to the heavy rain in autumn and the melting snow and ice in spring, both of which turn streets into muddy bogs. Such conditions famously hindered Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. They also played havoc with Nazi Germany’s offensive towards Moscow in 1941. “The roads rapidly became nothing more than canals of bottomless mud, along which our vehicles could only advance at a snail’s pace and with great wear to the engines,” lamented Heinz Guderian, a German general, that October. “The Ukrainian mud in spring has to be seen to be believed,” noted a British journalist during a Soviet offensive in 1944. “The whole country is swamped, and the roads are like rivers of mud, often two-feet deep.”
Edited by Junior71 2/7/2023 08:34
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War outcome
