The Kremlin is confident it will vanquish Ukraine — at least publicly —  but a Russian reserve colonel and military commentator thinks otherwise. “We need to view one million well-armed Ukrainian soldiers as a reality for the coming months,” Mikhail Khodaryonok said during a Russian state television broadcast. “We need to take it into account that the situation for us will frankly get worse.”

Colonel Khodaryonok’s pronouncement on the progress, or lack thereof, in Russia’s months-long campaign to trample Ukraine into oblivion was completely at odds with Moscow’s official line. The Russian newspaper RBC reported today that the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said, “We are confident that everything will be fine, and we are confident that we will win and we will achieve all our goals. Our president knows where he is leading our country, we all see what a political consensus and level of support our president has.”

Yet Colonel Khodaryonok’s searingly frank comments to a wide Russian audience inured to a completely varnished version of global events undercuts any notion of consensus on the war, which is costing Russia more in blood and treasure than perhaps anyone outside the Kremlin truly knows. “However we hate to admit it, the whole world is against us,” Colonel Khodaryonok told viewers, estimated to be millions of people.

While other pundits on Rossiya 1’s “60 Minute” talk show hewed to Vladimir Putin’s by now customary refrain about the unprovoked invasion being a “necessity” to fend off an attack from Ukraine, Colonel Khodaryonok pressed on, saying that Ukrainians are “defending their homeland” regardless of whether some in Russia care to agree. 

The BBC’s Francis Scarr, whose Twitter bio says he “watches Russian state TV so you don’t have to,” called the comments an “extremely rare moment of candor on Russian state TV” in which “defense columnist Mikhail Khodaryonok gave a damning assessment of Russia’s war in Ukraine and his country’s international isolation.”

What made the segment riveting to watch to some Western eyes was less the comments about an ill-conceived and protracted military campaign than the persistence with which the host tried, in vain, to deflect the commentator’s truth darts. What is the use of courting closer ties with Britain, she prodded, when India and China have Russia’s back? Colonel Khodaryonok said that he would not be so sure of that. 

As for the bids of Finland and Sweden for membership in the NATO military alliance, he again did not mince words: “Let’s look at the situation as a whole from the overall strategic position,” he said. “Don’t engage in saber-rattling with missiles in Finland’s direction. It actually looks very amusing.”

Another woman who is close to the Kremlin did not find the commentator’s remarks the least bit amusing. The ever-spirited Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said, “Today, under pressure from Washington, Finland and Sweden, which for decades have maintained a neutral stance on international affairs and have not participated in any military bloc, are being forced to join the North Atlantic Alliance and change their strategic policy direction.” She added that the Nordic countries’ accession to NATO, in her view under American pressure, was “loosening Russia’s hands.”

Meanwhile, other Russian state-backed media such as RIA Novosti made no mention at all of Colonel Khodaryonok’s rogue remarks, which also included this zinger: “The Lend-lease program is about to start functioning,” he said, “and the resistance of a single senator will be overcome quite quickly.” 

He prefaced that warning with some characteristic Russian condescension for Ukraine: “On their own, of course, they wouldn’t have done anything,” he told his audience.