Barrayar as a backward hellhole regrettably in possession of advanced weaponry, whose militaristic rulers are keen on invading other planets when they deem it necessary, which may be the same as when possible

Notably, one of those invasions was not only never intended to succeed, but carried out entirely as a means of dealing with a problem that could have much more efficiently been solved with a handful of the wrong kind of mushrooms or some other plausible tragic accident.