Russia's paranoia about invasion is written into its map

Marshall opens with Russia's defining geographic problem: it sits on the vast North European Plain, a huge stretch of flat land with no major natural barriers separating it from Western Europe, meaning historically that anyone from Napoleon in 1812 to Hitler's Wehrmacht in 1941 could simply walk in. This lack of a mountain range or wide sea acting as a natural moat has shaped centuries of Russian strategic behavior, driving a persistent obsession with buffer states and defensible borders.

He argues this explains Russia's enduring anxiety about NATO expansion into former Soviet states and its aggressive posture toward Ukraine and the Baltics — not simply as expansionist aggression for its own sake, but as an attempt to recreate strategic depth against a historically real invasion threat. Vladimir Putin's actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Marshall suggests, follow a strategic logic that Russian leaders from the Tsars through Stalin would have recognized instantly.

Marshall isn't excusing aggression, but insisting that understanding why Russia behaves this way requires looking at a map, not just at Putin's personality.

Takeaway: a country with no mountains to hide behind will always be anxious about who controls the plain in front of it.