In a recent appearance on Russia’s state-run television, Russian political scientist Sergey Mikheyev suggested that the country’s “empire” should grow to encompass three American states.
“I want the Russian empire with Alaska, Hawaii, California, Finland, and Poland,” he said, as translated by Gerashchenko for the clip he shared. “Although Poland and Finland are so stinky, I’m not sure, to be honest. We’ll clean them.”
Lets say Russia magically is able to land on US soil completely intact after passing through the US Navy infested waters of the Atlantic or the Pacific. Lets just assume they can so we can continue this crazy thought experiment.
To take territory you need boots on the ground, troops, tanks, APCs, etc. These are transported by troop transport aircraft and large ships that are naval landing craft. For Russia that would be the Ropucha-class. Each of these ships can carry about 10 tanks and about 310 troops (per ship).
So how many of these ship does Russia have? Hundreds, right? Nope: 11. Thats it. So assuming a full load of every ship thats about 110 tanks and about 3500ish troops. And all of that assumes all 11 ships will make it alive to US soil.
This is just how crazy this Russian claim of taking US States is.
It’s not supposed to make sense, it’s supposed to make actual Kremlin policy seem sane and moderate to the domestic audience.
They wouldn’t need magic. They’d just need a hamburder puppet President in office.
*hamberder. You give him too much credit.
You forget that Alaska is like 2 miles from Russia
Well, there’s a remote island that belongs to Alaska that’s about two miles away from a remote island that belongs to Russia. You can swim across that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diomede_Islands
I mean, I’m sure that Russia can get forces across that. They’ve got a military base on their little island, and we’ve got a small Native American village on our little island.
But then you’ve planted some number of forces on a strategically-irrelevant island in the Pacific. You’ve blown your largest advantage, surprise, and you’ve dumped however many people there, with a supply line that dictates that you need to support them by having ships sail up, while you just kicked off a war with a country with a much larger navy and air force.
And it’s not much of a springboard to a beachhead that you can use for land-based logistics, because there’s no infrastructure up there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait_crossing
He’s talking about California. He understands taking Alaska and Hawaii, but cali?
Hmm, Pearl Harbor and the place where the 10th mountain train to fight in snow.
Ok Ivan, good luck. You’re gonna need it.
Bruh there’s so many gun nuts in Alaska that jerk off to Red Dawn it’ll be Winter War 2: Now With Air Support
I think you forget that we have 24 hour satellite surveillance all over the globe.
If you think Russia could send a large fraction of its blue water navy to one single point on the globe while also mustering all those troops and equipment on the ground in Russia beforehand without the US knowing about it weeks before hand, you don’t have a good grasp on the level of technology employed in today’s military.
Also its alaska. Russia would be operating out of what, vladivastok maybe to take similarly shitty US ports in alaska.
If russia wants shitty coastal wilderness at uninhabitable climates they already have them.
Yeah, but we have Sarah Palin there to take care of it for us.
Where is Russia 2 miles from Alaska? It’s about 50ish miles. Last I checked, it’s also not a great place to start a ground invasion. The US could blow the shit out of that area of Alaska and nothing much would be missed.
Is it that far? You can see Russia from alaska
The international border goes between the islands of little and big Diomede. Both of these islands are remote from land in either direction, and they are situated about midway in the narrowest part of the Bering Strait.
Since you asked where, here it is on a map
Yep, that’s pretty close, but nope, that’s not really tactically meaningful.
Not to mention every other citizen is armed
That doesn’t matter at all
Not even a little bit? Okay…
If civilian gun ownership was enough to stop a military then the US would never have gotten a standing military. Like what the 2nd amendment was intended for
Well, it did in the American Revolutionary War. But there hasn’t been much by way of countries seriously looking into invading the US over the centuries.
We do have one instance, though.
In World War I, Germany tried to get Mexico to invade the US, and offered to provide support in annexing part of the US.
Mexico’s leadership had the military examine the proposal. They advised against it. One of the cited rationales for not invading was the widespread gun ownership in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram
But, again, I think that all this misses the point. There isn’t going to be land warfare, much less militia warfare, against Russian land forces. Russia doesn’t have the means to transport forces from Russia to the US. The US has a considerably larger air force and navy, and an invasion fleet is going to run into that in the Pacific before it gets to California.
Well…once they consolidate their claim of Canada it will be easier
It’s something about 4 kilometers from Russia to US. Or 86 km between mainlands.
No. First you make the inhabitants ask russia for brotherly help. Invitation > invasion.
Hmm.
I mean, it’s not gonna happen for other reasons (including the “Russia doesn’t have the naval and air forces to get control of the ocean required to have the ships cross it” point in the Vice article that I link to in another comment), but if we set that aside and assume a hypothetical world where Russia could get control of the sea and the air over the Pacific, I think that there’d be hypothetical ways to work around a limited number of landing ships.
The amphibious forces have to be able to seize and defend a port so that non-amphibious-assault ships get in.
So, the capacity is bounded by the time required to do a round trip to your staging point and the number of ships you have.
And there isn’t really any land nearby to use as a staging point.
But…you don’t actually have to reload at land. I mean, you could do ship-to-ship transfer, then have the landing ships do another run in from an offshore concentration of warships. If you really worked at it, you could probably get pretty good throughput.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underway_replenishment
They also have LCACs. Those can land forces on unimproved beaches as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aist-class_LCAC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebed-class_LCAC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsaplya-class_LCAC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zubr-class_LCAC
I assume that they can launch them from Ivan Gren-class LSDs. Maybe it’s possible to load them via crane or something to increase throughput, dunno what doctrine is.
They also have some ships that can carry helicopters, and can use that for insertion from offshore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Naval_Aviation
And they have some landing craft of other sorts than what you mentioned; see the “landing craft” section:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Russian_Navy_ships#Landing_craft