Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and shortly after it began, retired Russian Colonel Mikhail Khodarenok already warned that his country had been wrong to underestimate the Ukrainian forces and their ability to resist. Now Colonel Khodarenok has done it again, but this time on Russian television and with stronger criticism of the war in Ukraine.
On Russia’s most-watched talk show, Mikhail Khodarenok, a Kremlin military strategist and retired air defense colonel, called on the Russian people to stop taking “information sedatives” and accept that “the situation for us will clearly get worse.” .
Khodanerok did not hesitate to assure, to the discomfort of the presenter of the program, that the Russian population had received lies about the lack of morale and psychological collapses among the Ukrainian ranks and rejected the assertions that the Ukrainian state of mind was “close to the crisis”.
“To put it mildly, this is not true,” he said, adding that Ukraine will soon have mobilized more than a million soldiers who will be trained and ready to “shed blood for their homeland.”
“The main thing in our business is to have a sense of political-military realism: if you go further, the reality of the story will hit you so hard that you won’t know what hit you,” he said.
As the former head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Khodarenok has strong ties with senior officers on active duty. And despite the insistence of what they call “Putin’s doll”, the presenter Olga Skabeyeva, faithful to the Kremlin line, the colonel did not hesitate to praise the resistance of the Ukrainian Army and to warn what is to come: “A desire to protect one’s homeland, in the sense that it exists in Ukraine, it really exists there, they intend to fight to the last man Ultimately, victory on the battlefield is determined by a high level of morale among the staff, who shed blood for ideas they are prepared to fight for.
“Sooner or later reality will hit you so hard you won’t know what hit you… We need to figure this out,” he added.
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