>>21621
When else can you invade, Timur the Lame? At Spring and Autumn you have rasputitsa, that is swampy mud all over everywhere, and at Winter you have Le Russian Winter. Scandinavia is warmer than Belarus, the more to the east you go the worse it gets.
And that's the warmest path in, in the east there is the literal North Cold Pole, that is a place colder than The North Pole for a change.
Both Nappy and Hitler planned to winter at Moscow, except the first one had Moscow burned by the locals and the second one fell short. There is no other way to invade Russia on foot. And then even if Hitler succeeded, Moscow street fighting would have been StalingradX10, and the govt would chill at Samara same way it chilled at St.Pete's 130 years before.

>>21625
>Japan attacks the USSR from the east, forcing troops from the Siberian front to stay and fight the Japanese, meaning the Germans don't get pushed back west initially
They tried twice beforehand, at Primorie and Mongolia, and both times had their asses handed to them. Japs are terrible at land warfare. Perhaps the IJN is cool, the Imperial Army was shit.
They had big plans for the Russian Far East during the total collapse of 1917-1921 already, yet withdrew because their soldiers suffered unacceptable losses due to cold of all things (+America getting upset too). Occupation of Russian Far East would be a terrible drain, not possible, not with an already full-swing campaing in China.
>Moscow would be up for the taking
Nappy took Moscow, didn't change anything. Again, Russia doesn't end at Moscow. There are tens of millions of people on the Volga, Kazan oil fields were already being exploited and Samara prepped to be temporary capital. If the worst comes to pass, there are Ekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk and Omsk east of the Urals. Russia is impossible to occupy, it's a fact.
Maaaybe Hitler could have created some client Russia state to fight its Soviet twin on its own weight, most probably never would.

Anyway, the war was lost before it even began. Maaaaybe smashing the British at Dunkirk might have changed something, but most probably not.