In the much-watched talk show 60 minutes Military analyst and ex-Colonel Mikhail Khodarjonok shattered the optimistic reports in the Russian media that the Ukrainian army is on the brink of morale collapse. According to Chodarjonok, in reality this is not the case at all. According to him, the Ukrainian armed forces can mobilize a million soldiers, highly motivated and armed with modern Western weapons. “That’s a near-future reality that we have to face.”
He also criticized the nuclear weapons threats, which he called “almost laughable.” As his interlocutors listened in astonishment, he warned, “Even though we don’t want to admit it, pretty much the whole world is against us. That’s a situation we have to get out of.’ It was striking that even Olga Skabejeva, the ultra-nationalist presenter of the program, hardly objected.
The refugee Russian political scientist Andrei Piontkovsky described Chodarjonok’s actions as a ‘first capitulation in the name of the Russian armed forces’. “This is not just the opinion of a dissident colonel. This is the general view among Russian professional soldiers: that we have lost the war and that we must make political decisions immediately,” he told Ukrainian television channel 24 Kanal.
Recently, there has been increasing criticism of the unfortunate course of the military operation. The discontent was first expressed in reactions to the sinking of the cruiser Moskva, which was sunk by Ukrainian missiles last month.
Even more fierce was criticism of the failed attempt by Russian troops last week to cross the Seversky Donets, a river in the Donbas. They came under heavy fire from a Ukrainian tank brigade, which destroyed the newly constructed pontoon bridge, plus dozens of Russian tanks. As many as 500 Russian soldiers may have been killed.
Russian defense bloggers called it a huge blunder that the crossing troops had no cover. One of them even suggested that there may have been sabotage.
‘Stupidity from the top’
Igor Girkin (aka Strelkov), the military commander of the separatists in the Donbas in 2014, also regularly hacks into the army. “The operation to defeat the Ukrainian troops there has failed,” he concludes. According to him, the military top has committed a stupidity by announcing the offensive and not deploying enough troops. “Only our general staff managed to count on a decisive success.”
But Girkin’s criticism, and that of military analysts, focuses primarily on the commanders’ fumbling, not on President Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.
In February, Chodarjonok had openly opposed the war. In a piece for the defense supplement of the now closed opposition newspaper Nezavisimaja Gazeta he warned just before the invasion that the invasion would not be ‘easy’, as many politicians predicted.
He was right on almost all counts. The Ukrainians would not welcome the Russian troops with flowers, but would fight back; it would not be possible to eliminate the Ukrainian air force, air defense and armored units in one fell swoop; the western countries would immediately start supplying Ukraine with weapons and it would be very difficult to take large cities. ‘In short, there will be no blitzkrieg’, Chodarjonok summed up.
Rumbled into the war
Once the war started, the former colonel moderated his criticism. Only recently he praised the Russian troops for their ‘disciplined’ advance in the Donbas. That was probably the reason why he was still welcome in the program of Skabejeva, who is known as one of the most rabid Kremlin propagandists.
Chodarjonok’s razor-sharp speech on the talk show may be a sign of friction between the military and the Kremlin, now that the military operation seems to have come to a standstill. It is likely that many soldiers share his feeling that they have been tricked into the war by over-enthusiastic nationalist politicians with no knowledge of military affairs.
But the question is whether Putin will tolerate that criticism. Now that the grumbling about mounting losses (but kept strictly secret by the Kremlin) is growing, it is in his mind right to shift the blame to the executors, the military commanders in Ukraine.