Throughout its geopolitical history, Russia has been fighting through all the invasions coming from multiple directions. The Russian Empire, called Muscovy around the 15th century, was getting invaded from mainly two directions. The first one was the path that the Mongols used which were the lands that connected Russia to Central Asia. Then there were the invasions from the North European Plain. As a way to deal with the hard times, Russia had expenditures divided in three phases.
In the first one, the expansion was to move away from the corridors where the invasion was happening. In the 15th century, Ivan III was in power, and during that time, Russia had separated from Kiev, which is the current capital of Ukraine. Also, during that period,
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One of them was holding its empire together but the creation of it posed the second problem, which was essentially maintaining their internal security. The reason why it’s a challenge is because Russia has to hold the empire together as well as defend it and to achieve one of the two goals, it causes a failure to achieve the other because they can’t maintain both at the same time. Not only does Russia have a geographical and an economical problem, the distribution of its population creates a political problem. As a result of the transport problem, people would live near growing areas and in smaller towns as a way to avoid the taxes on the transport system.
Because of its geography, it is understandable why Russia would try and expand their territory as much as they did. They had attacks coming from the North European Plain and from the Central Asian and European steppes all at the same time. Not only did they have this military problem, they also had to figure out a way to feed their population, especially during the difficult time of war. As for the west, the expansion wasn’t simple at all, it didn’t matter how far west they went into the European side, the Russians could never successfully settle