Napoleon stayed in Moscow for 5 weeks, waiting for a peace offer that never came. On 14 September, Napoleon and his army of about 100,000 men occupied Moscow, only to find it abandoned, and the city was soon ablaze. The fierce Battle of Borodino, seventy miles (110 km) west of Moscow, was a narrow French victory that resulted in a Russian general withdrawal to the south of Moscow near Kaluga. Under its new Commander in Chief Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian Army continued to retreat, employing attrition warfare against Napoleon forcing the invaders to rely on a supply system that was incapable of feeding their large army in the field. Through a series of long forced marches, Napoleon pushed his army rapidly through Western Russia in a futile attempt to destroy the retreating Russian Army of Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly, winning just the Battle of Smolensk in August. On 24 June 1812 and the following days, the first wave of the multinational Grande Armée crossed the border into Russia with somewhere between 450,000 and 600,000 soldiers, the opposing Russian field forces amounted to around 180,000–200,000 at this time. The Second Polish Campaign, the Patriotic War of 1812, and the War of 1812, was begun by Napoleon to force Russia back into the Continental blockade of the United Kingdom.
The French invasion of Russia, also known as the Russian Campaign,, the Second Polish War, Minard's Map of French casualties see also Attrition warfare against Napoleon
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