Ukraine’s geography largely mimics a key American system for exports. As geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan contends, that makes Ukraine appealing for Russia from an economic standpoint and explains why the Russians continue pummeling Ukraine.

Ukraine in many ways is like the American Midwest. It has a big river going through its most productive territory. So in the United States, that’s the Mississippi–allows for all of the grain- and soy-producing states to export their stuff at low cost out to New Orleans. In Ukraine, it’s the Dnieper–serves the same purpose. Everything goes down the river and is ultimately repackaged at Odessa for shipment to the wider world. 

For Russia though, it doesn’t work that way. Russia only has one river that flows south. That is the Volga and it dead ends in the Caspian Sea, which is a landlocked lake. The north flowing rivers, the Ob for example, have a different problem.

One, they flow to the Arctic, and no one lives there. Two, in winter, the rivers flow from the mouth to the source rather than the other way around. And when your river is flowing into ice, it breaks up the ice. It pushes the ice ahead of it until there’s too much ice. And then the ice gets, by its mere weight, gets pushed down to the river bed and it forms an ice dam. Ice dams can last a long time and you get massive floods as the river overflows its banks. And it does this in Russia, every fall, moving into winter, all winter along, and then especially in the spring melt, ’cause then it melts from the source to the mouth instead of the other way around. And the water has nowhere to go.

So most of the flood plains in most of the world are used for agriculture. In Russia, not necessarily because it’s a death trap. It means that Russia knows that its internal distribution is crap, and Russia knows it can’t sell any excess production to the wider world, ’cause it’s hard to get it out.

But Ukraine can. Ukraine is the most productive land in the Russian sphere of influence. They have huge agricultural surpluses, a fair number of metals, some coal, other chemicals…and it can all get out easily. And once it’s to the Black Sea, it can go to Turkey or through the Turkish Straits to Europe and the wider world.

For Russia, it’s never been that easy. So Ukraine has always been a territory that the Russians have grabbed onto very tightly. And now that Ukraine is making a reasonable go at being independent and even doing well in the war, the Russians feel they have to destroy all of that.