Russia's Geography Sucks, and Here's How

throughout the centuries Russia has wielded immense political economic and Military influence across the world but there's always been a problem that severely limits Russia's dominance as a world superpower a problem which even today has significantly affected the country's decisions Russia's geography is far worse in comparison to basically every other country in Europe and here's how for starters let's take a look at this map of Europe this map in particular shows the elevation of different parts of the continent as you can see on the map there are virtually no mountains anywhere near Russia's western border acting as protection instead there's essentially the opposite these massive stretches of flat land are known as the great European Plain and the Eurasian step and they make Russia's western border almost impossible to defend it also doesn't help that major Russian cities like St Petersburg and Moscow are located pretty close to the edge of Russia's borders meaning that if an invading Army wanted to take over Moscow they would only have to travel around 500 kilometers like wise if an army wanted to take over the Keyport city of Saint Petersburg they would only have to travel about 150 kilometers assuming that their starting point was in Estonia people have used this weak border as a means to invade Russia for centuries and in fact the earliest example I could find dates all the way back to the 1200s at this point in time the country we know today as Russia was merely a loose group of Slavic and Scandinavian peoples known as the Kiev in Russ they were a thriving Society in Eastern Europe at the time but unbeknownst to them a rising Empire more than 3 000 kilometers away will be looking Westward for land to pillage these people were the Mongols and had the largest land Empire on Earth being such a powerful civilization it's not surprising that they were able to notice this weakness and use it as a gateway to invade the Russians a total of more than forty thousand Mongols on Horseback and made their way to the Cuban ruse and it quickly fell in the face of this giant attack it would be more than 240 years until the Russians were finally free from the Mongols and this Invasion proved just how much of a week goodness this border was for the Russian people fast forwarding to today Russia still possesses this massive geographical weakness however naturally the Russians have tried to find ways to defend this weakness making it harder for any country to take advantage of it the most obvious way in which this weakness has been counteracted is simply through diplomacy throughout the past few decades Russia has attempted to strengthen ties with countries west of its border particularly the country of Belarus has maintained extremely close ties with Russia which has helped to buffer its western border against potential threats from NATO this mentality of keeping a safe zone between the Russian Mainland and NATO also explains why Russia became so hostile towards Ukraine which at the time seemed to be aligning itself more towards the Western countries and NATO Russia's fear with this comes with the obvious fact that if Ukraine were to join NATO Russia would have to be dealing with another Potential Threat right on its doorstep already the NATO countries of Estonia Latvia Lithuania Poland and even Finland which joined NATO on April 4th of this year are a threat to Russia's established borders and if Ukraine joined NATO it would just make matters worse for Russia while Russia's geography has always posed significant land-based challenges there has also been the issue of Russia's access to the ocean taking a look at Russia it would seem like ocean access wouldn't be much of a problem for them considering that they have the coastline that stretches a total of 37 000 kilometers long and while Russia does indeed have a large amount of ports along the coasts de-sports all possess a variety of issues ports like Vladivostok and magadon on the Eastern side of Russia experience Frozen coasts during the cold months of the year even on the other side of Russia the major port of St Petersburg is known to freeze regularly however for a lot of these ports the cold isn't even the largest problem you see Russia's ocean access is fundamentally limited by its location for example the port of novorosis on the Black Sea is ice-free year-round but as you can see on the map to get to the open ocean it has to travel through the Bosphorus Strait a Waterway can controlled by the NATO country of Turkey similarly the Baltic Sea which is home to several of Russia's largest ports runs into the same problem to get to the ocean Russian ships need to pass through one of these two Danish controlled Straits and Denmark just like turkey is another NATO member back over on the east side of Russia the important port of Vladivostok along with many others face the problem of entering the Pacific Ocean to get ships from ports like volleyball stock out into the open ocean they have to get through the Sea of Japan a body of water which as the name suggests is controlled by Japan and while Japan isn't in NATO it's an extremely strong Ally of the United States hopefully you can start to see a pattern emerge and obviously this presents a huge problem for Russia if the Russian government ever wanted to attack a NATO country at any point in time then their access to the ocean would be severely restricted by NATO whose member countries would blockade Russia through each of these choke points if NATO ever chose to blockade these waterways Russia's international trading capabilities would be extremely hindered even though Russia would still have access to the Arctic Ocean and the ports surrounding it as we saw earlier with Vladivostok and magadon it tends to get a little bit cold up there the only exception to the freezing cold temperatures of the Arctic Ocean is the port of mermansk this port despite being located in the Arctic Circle manages to be completely ice free year round now you might think that because mermans technically has access to the ocean that it would be easy for it to trade with other countries no matter what NATO does however this couldn't be further from the truth Ships coming from mermans run into the same problem of entering the ocean you see the only plausible wave for ships from this port to get into the open ocean is either by going between the UK and France going in between the UK and Iceland or by going through the Bering Strait a Waterway separating Russia and Alaska with these two routes it's pretty obvious what the problems are it wouldn't be difficult for the United States or other NATO countries to take control of these waterways limiting Russia's access to the ocean however with this third route the problem is a little bit more complicated this route runs right through a region called the GI UK Gap more formally known as the Greenland Iceland United Kingdom Gap this area is heavily monitored by NATO whose member countries have established a network of radar stations and other intelligence gathering assets to monitor activities in the region the immense surveillance on this part of the ocean would make it incredibly challenging for unauthorized ships for example ships from Russia to pass through undetected this whole problem of Russia's access to the ocean has had a huge effect on its power throughout the world but moving away from potential outside threats let's take a look at Russia's internal geography Russia is a massive country it stretches across two continents and encompasses nearly 1 8 of the Earth's total land area but despite being such a humongous country the amount of land where crops can be grown is severely lacking up North near the Arctic Circle Tundra is found everywhere it's far too cold for trees and crops to grow there making it completely unusable for agriculture but not just that in Russia's forested tyager regions the soil lacks any natural food for crops but even when you're not in the tundra or the Taiga regions there's still a pretty good chance that the land will be unusable for crops and this has to do with the fact that a majority of Russia lies above what is called permafrost which is a thick layer of soil under the surface that remains Frozen throughout the year this essentially makes the land unusable for any type of farming and unfortunately for Russia permafrost is found below about 65 percent of its total land area all this leaves only about seven percent of Russia's land which is actually arable and this has for a long time limited the population growth of the country now obviously since Russia is a huge country seven percent is still a ton of arable land and for comparison this amount of land area is similar to the size of the African country of Mali but even though there still might be a decent amount of land the thing about this Farmland is that it only has a growing season of around five to six months this is significantly less than the nine month growing season of Western Europe so in a country where more than 90 of the land is unusable for agriculture invasions from bordering countries remain serious threats and Maritime trade can be taken away at any moment how did Russia manage to overcome its Geographic challenges and maintain its status as a global power well this comes down to the simple fact that Russia has enormous amounts of oil and natural gas Russia is one of the top three crude oil producers in the world only behind Saudi Arabia and the United States since Russia produces such a large amount of oil and natural gas the country relies heavily on the revenues they produce from these resources which in 2021 made up 45 percent of Russia's federal budget the reason I'm using a statistic from 2021 is because just a few months later in 2022 Russia would launch its attack on Ukraine which was the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II up until this point Russia had been the main oil and natural gas supplier for Europe but after news broke of this Invasion everything changed for Russia not wanting to support Russia's violent actions the International Community including some of Russia's most important trading partners in Europe decided to impose sanctions on Russian oil this means that Europe in countries which had previously been Russia's largest customers gradually stopped their dependency on Russian oil and gas products with its biggest Market no longer a viable option for trade Russia had to turn its eyes towards other countries Vladimir Putin decided that countries in Asia were the best option and during 2022 Russia was able to redirect its oil exports to many different Asian countries and surprisingly this strategy actually worked Russia not only retained the oil money it had previously got in but it also increased its revenue from energy exports this was something that greatly surprised the West who thought that their sanctions on Russian oil would surely crumble the country's economy some sources predicted that Russia's GDP would shrink by as much as 11 percent that year what they were met with was only a decrease of 2.1 percent basically nothing compared to what was predicted so it's safe to say that Russia's Global influence at least in the world of fossil fuels isn't going away anytime soon now while discussing Russia's successes in the oil industry it's important to acknowledge that Russia can't just ignore the numerous geographical challenges faces every single Russian leader from Stalin to Gorbachev and now Putin has been plagued with the same challenges concerning Russia's geography each of these leaders had their own way of dealing with these problems and it'll be interesting to see how Putin and Future Leaders of the country take on these issues anyways thanks so much for making it this far into the video if you want to support the channel even more make sure to join my Discord which is linked down below other than having a great community of people who like geography the server has a few unlisted tutorials on how I create my animations so if you're trying to get into After Effects these tutorials would be a good place to start with all that being said I'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: Reed Schultz Geo

Views: 80,462

Keywords: geography, reed schultz, mapping, mapper, maps, animated maps, fun fact, countries, country fact, interesting fact, geopolitics, russia, nato, united states

Id: SyM7VaFABp8

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2023