"General Mud" Has Usually Been on Russia's Side in War. Not This Time.
Like many, I was surprised by Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, and to not limit his activities to the country’s separatist regions. If Putin’s invasion had been planned for some time, he certainly didn’t choose the best time of year to invade Ukraine. The forecast for the next few days is unusually cold, but in much of the country—as will soon be the case farther north—it is currently the time of rasputitsa or rasputitsia (распутица in Russian).
One Russian dictionary defines rasputitsa as “a time [of year] when dirt roads are difficult to traverse or indeed impossible to do so; the condition of roads at this time [of year].” I have not only spent many a number of springs and falls in Russia but, as someone living on the Canadian prairies, am familiar with the equivalent here. In the spring, melting snow and rain often make dirt roads and fields impassible until they dry out; in the fall, the rains before the snow have the same effect. Strangely enough, the onset of colder temperatures typically makes the going easier, when the ground is frozen—before there is really deep snow, which hampers mobility again.
The timing of Putin’s invasion is particularly odd for someone who seems to place so much stock on historical precedent, given the impact the rasputitsa has had on past foreign invasions of Russia and the Soviet Union. During Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Russia in 1812, the spring rasputitsa was not an issue for the French advance, because Napoleon—in some ways wisely—waited until the summer to launch his invasion. I write “in some ways,” because waiting until the summer does not give armies invading Russia a lot of time before the fall to defeat Russian forces in the vast territory over which they are forced to operate. The fall rasputitsa undoubtedly complicated the initial phases of the retreat of Napoleon’s Grande Armée from Russia, at a time when man and beast struggled in the mud of unpaved roads.
The impact of the rasputitsa is perhaps more celebrated in the case of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Although the invasion was supposed to have begun in May, a wet spring and the need to send German troops to Yugoslavia in the face of a coup there meant that Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union—was delayed until late June. Although the dust on the many unpaved roads in the summer caused its own problems, far more detrimental for German mobility was the fall rasputitsa.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/%e2%80%9cgeneral-mud%e2%80%9d-has-usually-been-on-russias-side-in-war-not-this-time/ar-AAUVLdD
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