In every modern war, Ukraine has been the big prize

The biggest story of 2022 was the war in Ukraine, which put that country on the front lines of the great struggle of this century: the contest between democracy and authoritarianism. But if the war surprised many observers, the position in which Ukraine finds itself is remarkably familiar.

With only modest exaggeration, we could call the past 100 years or so the Ukrainian Century, for that country has figured centrally in every great global clash of the modern era.

Ukraine is a strategic prize due to resources and geography. Occupying some of the richest agricultural land anywhere, it produces large shares of the world's wheat, corn and barley; it accounts for 6% of all calories traded on international food markets. Ukraine is Europe's second-largest country by geographical size, and overlooks the Black Sea, which links European Russia to the world.

Most important, Ukraine is the hinge connecting what the great geopolitical thinker Halford Mackinder termed the Eurasian Heartland, with its enormous lands, agricultural riches and energy resources, to the economically advanced countries of Europe.

Any European empire seeking to expand eastward must pass through Ukraine; any Eurasian power seeking to project influence into Europe must do likewise. Mackinder had Ukraine (and Poland) in mind when he argued in 1919: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World,"

Hyperbole, perhaps, but a formula that helps explain why Ukraine has been so tragically prominent in so many terrible struggles.

"As much as anything, World War I turned on the fate of Ukraine," the scholar Dominic Lieven wrote. Conquering the area, then part of the Russian empire, was central to Germany's plans to create a resource-rich Mitteleuropa from the North Sea to the Caucasus. When German armies wrested Ukraine away from a post-revolutionary Russia in 1918, Berlin briefly achieved its Eurasian vision — which crumbled when Germany lost the war on the Western front, thereby undoing its Eastern conquests and allowing Lenin's Soviet Union to create its own Eurasian empire under Communist rule.

Ukraine again loomed large in Adolf Hitler's dreams of hegemony. It possessed the "living space" and the foodstuffs that could render Germany impregnable against the continent-sized enemies — the British Empire and America — that Hitler ultimately planned to fight for global primacy.

The Nazis' genocidal "hunger plan" envisioned looting Ukrainian wheat, corn and agricultural products, and leaving as many as 30 million citizens there and elsewhere in the Soviet Union to starve. (In effect, it was a replay of the "red famine" that Joseph Stalin had inflicted on Ukraine in the 1930s as a means of consolidating Moscow's rule there.) Some of the most desperate battles of World War II were fought on Ukrainian soil, as giant armies collided in this vital zone.

The Allied victory ensured merely that Ukraine remained subordinated to a totalitarian Soviet empire. As the Cold War began, the US sought to exploit the resulting dissatisfaction by parachuting Ukrainian paramilitaries into the country to foment violent resistance.

That initiative was a bloody fiasco, but the geopolitical logic behind it wasn't entirely wrong. When the Soviet Union began to fragment decades later, it was Ukraine's decision to bolt by declaring independence — and refusing to participate in schemes to hold a looser union together — that helped seal the system's fate.

"Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire," former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski observed in 1994, "but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire."

That's a good guide to understanding why Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his project to restore Moscow's mastery, beginning with Russia's meddling in Ukrainian elections in 2004 and culminating in the full-on invasion in February.

Putin targeted Ukraine in hopes of subduing one crucial piece of the post-Soviet landscape, and thereby bringing others, from Belarus to Kazakhstan, into line. A quick Russian victory would have been a testament to the strength and strategic cunning of the world's autocracies. It would have fundamentally changed the strategic situation in Europe by casting pervasive insecurity from the Black Sea to the Baltic, and left a freshly invigorated Chinese-Russian partnership clearly dominant within Eurasia.

Not much has gone according to plan, and a Ukrainian victory would bring very different consequences. It would make one the world's leading tyrants look pathetic rather than preeminent. It could create tension in Russia's partnership with China by forcing an enfeebled Putin to beg for assistance that Beijing would be reluctant to give. It would produce a revitalized Western community with a commanding position against a dangerous but degraded Russia. Once again, a war involving Ukraine will shape the contours of world order.

The war is also a reminder about how core features of geopolitics remain the same, even as so much in the world changes. Geography still matters. Land-hungry tyrants still seek to dominate their surroundings through conquest and murder.

In every generation, optimists hope that the world has left these ugly truths behind. As Ukraine's experience teaches us, we forget them at our peril.