Those things would make a German war of agression against Russia impossible after a point. But Russia would never be strong enough to try a war of agression against Germany (or a closely allied Austria), in a war where Germany would still be able to trade with the world.
Why wouldn't it? Sukhomlinov's Great Program was supposed to improve the Russian army to the point that literally everybody before the war on both sides
thought that Russia would be capable of pulling off a massive offensive into eastern Germany and pancaking the Krauts. Furthermore, the Russian military was not a defensive instrument any more than it was an offensive one. Why can it only have succeeded on the defensive and not on the offensive?
Germany would never do this under the Kaiser, they were intent on an imperial sphere in Eastern Europe of a realpolitik/brute force sort, as opposed to killing all the Slavs to Germanize Eastern Europe which is what the second version was about.
I agree, but with the caveat that this war goal only came up after the war actually started. But it definitely drove the way the negotiations went in 1918.
The Russian military had made enormous improvements in logistics and manpower potential since the 1905 Revolution and was in the middle of an improved logistical peacetime manpower coupling that would have given it a peacetime army sufficient to swamp the Germans in the opening offensive, rendering the Schlieffen Plan impossible.
Yeah, the "Great Program". It terrified pretty much everybody in Berlin. By the way, the "Schlieffen Plan" didn't exist.
Eh, the only thing that could help any Russian army is to focus on field artillery and field guns, not fortifications. Germany was prepared in all the right ways for WWI as it developed more than the other powers were, if Russia had put a fraction of the sheer ludicrous quantity of ammunition in the historical forts into actual field guns, the Germans would have needed all their skill to limit Russian incursions into Germany and would never have gotten near Warsaw.
The fortifications weren't a terrible idea by themselves, so long as they were actually used properly. In the event, they weren't; everybody knows the story of the fortress of Novogeorgievsk, which, when captured by the Germans in 1915, contained well over a million artillery shells in its bunkers. Even the lowly Austrians put their fortresses at Lemberg and Przemysl to better use.
What Russia's biggest problem was was its army's failure to decide on a single course of action. Some officers wanted to rely on a strategic defensive to take advantage of Russia's terrain and fortress system, a strategy that had excellent precedent in 1812. Others pointed to the French alliance and noted that they were committed to an invasion of Germany. Ultimately, all of Russia's war plans split the difference between these two options, as did Russia's military budget. Furthermore, the Russians, as did the French, failed to distinguish between the tactical defensive or offensive and the strategic defensive or offensive. Nobody seriously considered a offensive-defensive thrust into Germany or Austria, for instance. All of the imagery of the "attack" factions gravitated towards "cold steel" and "bayonet charge". The strategic defensive was usually connected to "artillerists" who preferred to keep the guns inside the fortresses; although there were some young Turks who argued for the field guns, they were few and far between and made no serious impact on budgetary discussions.
The result was something called "institutional surprise", something that crippled the Russians even more than did their failure to complete the Great Program by the start of the war. (It affected the French and Germans as well, but in rather dramatically different ways.) Russia's army was caught in a period of flux, which made it uniquely unprepared for waging war against Germany in the short run.