Functional Defeat: How Targeting Crimea Can Choke Putin's Army

Former UK Defence Secretary Sir Ben Wallace and former Ukrainian Defence Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk discuss how Putin sees losses in Ukraine and why Crimea is central to his thinking. Sir Ben Wallace says Putin “doesn’t consider losing his own people as something to lose” and instead views it as a “sacrifice for Mother Russia.” He argues that Putin is “in love with Crimea,” that “he romanticizes about it, he cries over it, he declares it’s Russia,” and that pressure on the viability of Crimea matters far more than fighting over small settlements in the Donbas. Andriy Zagorodnyuk outlines the idea of “functional defeat,” where Russian forces “may not be destroyed completely” but are made “unable to achieve any results.” He points to the Black Sea, where Ukraine has prevented the fleet from doing much while keeping the grain corridor running, and says this approach is difficult to replicate on land and in the air, but possible. Crimea, he notes, becomes “an enormous asset for Putin to lose.” Watch this section of the conversation to understand how Crimea shapes Putin’s mindset and why “functional defeat” could redefine the next phase of the war.