Fear, loathing and loss: The state of Russia's war in Ukraine

Retired Russian colonel speaks truth to power on Russian TV.

The situation is so dire for the Russian military in Ukraine that yesterday on a Russian 60-Minutes-style talk show on the state-owned Rossiya network, a retired Russian colonel, Mikhail Khodarenok, shocked his fellow guests and the show’s host by telling them, “The situation for us will clearly get worse.” He went on to share this nugget of forbidden information: “We are in total geopolitical isolation and the whole world is against us, even if we don’t want to admit it.”

It is not an exaggeration to say that this kind of truth telling is almost never done on Russian television or anywhere else in the state-run media for that matter.  Khodarenok, a frequent commentator in the Russian media, wrote a column before the invasion warning that the war would not be the “cake walk” predicted by many Russian analysts.  “There will be no blitzkrieg in Ukraine,” he wrote, correctly as it turned out.

Khodarenok was careful on the show not to be directly critical of the Russian effort in Ukraine, and when challenged by the show’s host who took the Kremlin line that “we had no choice” but to invade Ukraine, the retired colonel said repeatedly that “the situation is not normal,” which appears to be Russian code for SNAFU:  Situation Normal All Fucked Up.