Why did the Mongols attack Russia?

В каментах недвусмысленно заявлено, что Романовы фальсифицировали историю Руси чуть больше, чем полностью. Тут говорицо о том, что ига не было, но не с гумилёвской колокольни (имхо).

The Mongols didn’t seem to attack Russia for a couple of reasons

Of these, the main one is: There was no Russia at the time. When the Mongols came, the lands between the Carpathian mountains and the eastern tributaries of the Volga River were called Rus. “Russia” first tentatively came about as a territory name toward the end of the 15th century. Peter the Great made it an official name of our empire, more just an artifact in Czar’s full title.

So far, no forensic traces of the Mongols have been found outside of our southern prairies (i.e. in our forested heartland). Even in places like Ryazan and Kiev that at the time were within a day’s mounted ride from the open prairies no artifacts were found that corroborate the tales in our chronicles about Mongol sackings.

If we, based on what we know about the mid-13th century, try to look at the situation from the point of view of the Mongols, we must consider the following:

• The Rus fiefdoms are impoverished by the collapse of the Black Sea trade after 1204 and offer little to loot. Arabic coins are rare, the populace uses beads, shells and pelts as currency. The Pskov and Novgorod fiefdoms that use silver bars (whole or chopped: “ruble” meant originally a “chopped-off stub”) as currency are too far in the depth of the Eurasian taiga. The only ones who seem to be in possession of stored high-value, low-volume valuables like gold and silver are churches.
• As Christianity is largely an upper-class phenomenon, churches are only to be found in larger settlements where dukes hold their courts. Monasteries are rare and poor, because the laity is poor, and are typically just an abode of startzi who don’t run their own economy and do not collect valuables.
• The conquest of Balkan, Hungarian and Polish territories lying ahead requires a large force and strong logistics for going through the forested territories around the Carpathians.
• This force may be recruited among Rus fiefdoms, just the way the Mongols did the recruitment among Turkic tribes. This gives a logistical advantage, as Slavs possess the 101 of navigating and foraging in forested areas.
• The Rus lands at the time didn’t have roads. Almost all traffic happened on rivers: it was both faster and safer than land travel. River navigation is simply not suited for transporting large equestrian armies.
• Going into the woods deeper than one or two-day rides is riddled with huge risks. A large nomadic equestrian force stands a real chance of perishing in the taiga: it’s too easy to get lost, be split into smaller groups and slaughtered one by one, and the horses will simply starve for lack of grass in a matter of a week or two (the Mongolian horses at the time allegedly could not digest grain).
• A winter campaign in the woods—as described by the chronicles—would be an even more suicidal project for the Mongols. In addition to the scarcity of grass, the snow that was deeper than in the plains, would much slow down the progress. The famed Mongolian horses would spend more energy on digging up what little there was of the winter grass than getting nourishment. For the same reason, the tales of Mongol sieges that lasted for weeks seem to be pure science-fiction.

The simple fact that the Mongols didn’t even bother to install in the Rus fiefdoms a colonial administration as they did in the Turkic lands suggests that if sackings of 1237-42 really happened, they were probably perpetrated either by collaborating Rus dukes or the forest Turks from the eastern and northern tributaries of the Volga River.

The picture below: the forests in what is now Russia were much thicker and often impassable. They also stretched farther south than now. First during the 14–15th centuries the population growth thinned out the forestation and started to created continuous patches of arable land that made possible the “harvesting expeditions” of Crimean Tatars. If you order tens (or hundreds?) of thousands of your horse-mounted warriors to walk into this for a several week's long expedition during winter, your name is certainly not Batu or Oedegei.