Napoleon's main goal when he crossed the Niemen River in June 1812 was not to occupy Russian cities, but to destroy the Russian armies. Napoleon pinned a lot of hopes on being able to pin down and crush the main Russian forces with overwhelming force. This was a problematic strategy for a number of reasons. For one, the Grande Armée was simply too large and unwieldy to use with the speed required. Secondly, rivalries and hatreds among Napoleon's corps commanders made it very difficult for them to work as a team, and Napoleon's own confused staff work compounded matters. Third, the hot summer weather and terrain made it difficult to conduct speedy operations. The summer march ate into supplies and draft animals and contributed to outbreaks of dysentery and other ailments that wasted away the strength of the Grande Armée.

Finally, one has to give the Russians their due in thwarting Napoleon's plans. The Russian command was polarized between two camps on how to meet the French invasion. The defensive camp centered around War Minister Barclay de Tolly called for fighting a staged delaying action that would exhaust the enemy as it advanced into the interior, where it would be counterattacked by overwhelming force. A more aggressive strategy was championed by the likes of Prince Peter Bagration set the Oder as the final line of French advance and the the Russian army should immediately counterattack once the French invaded. Neither stratagem played out in 1812, but the command paralysis between these two camps encouraged a retreat towards Moscow.

The result was that the two armies that faced each other at Borodino were exhausted and rather less effective than they had been at the start of the campaign in June. Napoleon carried the day, but Grande Armée was in no shape to pursue the still large remnants of the Russian army. But Moscow appeared before Napoleon as a prize with no real force standing in his way to take it.

Herein lies a sometimes overlooked strategic myopia in Napoleon's grand strategy: he overestimated the importance of taking key cities to military operations. Napoleon sat in Moscow, even after the fires there was a considerable amount of the city left, hoping that this would lead the Tsar to make terms. Moreover, his Bulletins back to France emphasized the importance of Moscow and the glory achieved in capturing it. But Napoleon did not possess the supplies to winter in the city and there still was an extremely sizable Russian army in the field. Moscow became something of a poisoned chalice for Napoleon; he placed great political stock in occupying it, but he could not keep it. Additionally, recent lessons should have shown him that occupation of a capital did not end wars. Neither the occupation of Madrid in 1808 nor that of Vienna in 1809 ended the wars there. In the following campaign in 1813, Napoleon evinced an obsession with taking Berlin in the hopes of knocking Prussia out of the war, but this would not have been the shattering blow he anticipated. Russian forces had occupied Berlin during the Seven Years' War for four days in 1760 and almost again in 1762, and that did not cause Frederick II to abandon the war. If anything, the independent actions of the Prussian army chiefs showed that they prioritized defeating the French far more than even loyalty to the Hohenzollern crown.

Such it was with the Russian army. The longer Napoleon occupied Moscow in the hopes for a political settlement that would not come, the greater sway the Bagration camp possessed over the more cautious "foreigners" like Barclay de Tolly. In the meantime, Russian forces blocked Napoleon's alternate escape routes via the Kaluga, so the Grande Armée had to retreat over its own line of advance, which had been twice picked over by the two armies in the summer.