Johnny Harris is no friend of Putin, but this video is mainly non political and shows how and why Russia became so big. The original Russia had weak borders with no mountains or sea, and with one border being a grass flatland, it was under constant attack until it expanded outwards, and then outwards, and so on, not knowing when to stop. Most of the time they took over other countries peacefully, but not always.
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Check out this page and especially the graphic further down on the page. Suddenly, Russia doesn't look so big.
Mercator Misconceptions: Clever Map Shows the True Size of Countries
From the article:
Mercator’s Rise to the Top
With any map projection style, the big challenge lies in depicting a spherical object as a 2D graphic. There are various trade-offs with any map style, and those trade-offs can vary depending on how the map is meant to be used.
In 1569, the great cartographer, Gerardus Mercator, created a revolutionary new map based on a cylindrical projection. The new map was well-suited to nautical navigation since every line on the sphere is a constant course, or loxodrome.
Geographic Inflation
The vast majority of us aren’t using paper maps to chart our course across the ocean anymore, so critics of the Mercator projection argue that the continued use of this style of map gives users a warped sense of the true size of countries—particularly in the case of the African continent.
Mercator’s map inadvertently also pumps up the sizes of Europe and North America. Visually speaking, Canada and Russia appear to take up approximately 25% of the Earth’s surface, when in reality they occupy a mere 5%.
Now check out the size of Africa in this article:
Mapped: Visualizing the True Size of Africa
Africa could be seen as a supersized Russia.
The US also has more land area than Canada.
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