Few conflicts in modern times better demonstrate the tyranny of geography than the war in Ukraine. At its center is Crimea, a peninsula whose ownership has been fought over for centuries-a sad reminder that, geopolitically, location largely determines destiny. Once the historical homeland of the Crimean Tatars, it was annexed by Russia in 1783, fought over in the nineteenth-century Crimean War, and transferred to Ukraine in 1954 during the Soviet era. At the time, the move was administrative, almost trivial. No one imagined that the Soviet Union would collapse and leave Crimea under Kyiv’s control, setting the stage for a conflict that would claim hundreds of thousands of lives.

When it dissolved in 1991, the USSR bequeathed Crimea to Ukraine along with a nuclear arsenal that it later gave up in return for security guarantees. A weakened and impoverished Russia under Boris Yeltsin did nothing to question that settlement. Yet the seeds of future conflict were already being planted. NATO’s eastward expansion brought the alliance to Russia’s doorstep. 

For the Kremlin, Ukraine’s flirtation with NATO membership was not simply unwelcome; it was existential. Geography made it so. Ukraine’s leaders knew this. They knew that Russia would never accept NATO on its border without a fight. Yet they pressed forward anyway, “poking the bear,” as critics have argued. The result has been catastrophic: a war of attrition, the destruction of cities, hundreds of thousands dead, the displacement of millions, the loss of territory, and a permanent rupture with Moscow. Putin’s rhetoric about “Nazis” in Ukraine may........

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