We interrupt our regularly scheduled punditry to report some breaking news.

NEWSBREAK: Russia’s state TV permitted a highly decorated retired army colonel to report some actual, factual news on Monday about what has really gone wrong with Russia’s flailing, failing invasion of Ukraine.

Indeed, anchors and analysts on the Rossiya network’s leading news-talk show, “60 Minutes,” seemed shocked into silence when the show’s invited guest, retired Col. Mikhail Khodaryonok – who in 2020 was awarded by Vladimir Putin Russia’s “Medal of the Order” for “Merit to the Fatherland” – began uttering the sort of forbidden truths that had been carefully concealed from the fatherland’s propagandized public.

“The situation for us will clearly get worse,” said Russia’s former air defense commander. “ … We are in total geopolitical isolation and the whole world is against us, even if we don’t want to admit it.”

Now, those words don’t seem shocking to our westernized eyes. After all, you’ve been reading similar warnings here and elsewhere for half a year. (Months ago, we were saying China’s President Xi Jinping would learn a lot from Putin about what not to do in Taiwan. Because Putin’s invasion of Ukraine would isolate Russia from the global economy – just the opposite of what a leader of the global economy wants.) But millions of Russia’s trusting viewers of state TV have sadly been believing Putin’s version of Big Lies. And now one of Putin’s decorated military leaders was telling them that they’ve been conned.

So no wonder the state TV show’s panel sat in silence. Only the show’s anchor, Olga Skabeyeva – who has been called the Kremlin’s propagandist-in-chief – attempted to counter Khodaryonok’s warning. She recited a few of Putin’s favorite false talking points, including his fatuous claim that Russia “had no choice” but to send in its military (referring to Putin’s bizarre insistence that Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis).

You will not be surprised that Putin’s tele-propagandist was no match for Putin’s “Merit to the Fatherland” medal recipient.

“Let’s not consume info-sedatives,” replied the colonel. “ … The most important thing is remain realistic. … If you don’t, then sooner or later reality will hit you so hard you won’t know what’s hit you. … Sometimes information is being spread about some sort of psychological breakdown in Ukraine’s Armed Forces, suggesting some sort of a breakthrough is imminent. None of this has a basis in reality.

Remember, we must keep in mind what it must have been like for Putin’s millions of true believers to be watching this medal-winner’s warning with their Big Lie-fogged eyes. The colonel warned them about the danger of being misled by official information channels that inaccurately spread false info about Ukraine’s military. This Russian officer’s assessment was filled with praise for the military opponent his country chose to attack.

“Sometimes information is being spread about some sort of psychological breakdown in Ukraine’s Armed Forces, suggesting some sort of a breakthrough is imminent,” the colonel said. “None of this has a basis in reality.

“Ukraine’s armed forces can arm 1 million men. One million of armed Ukrainian soldiers should be accepted as a result of the near future. … As far as the desire to defend their Homeland, according to the understanding that exists in Ukraine, it’s most definitely present there. It is a component of an army’s high combat capability, it’s one of the most important components. …The European aid will fully come into effect, so a million armed Ukrainian soldiers needs to be viewed as a reality of the very near future. And it's that situation that we need to get out of.”

This rarest Russian TV video — Col. Khodaryonok telling of tough-truths on Russia’s state TV — has gone viral this week on the Russian social media website called VKontakte. It was an eye-opening first for millions of Russians who believed Putin and backed his Ukraine invasion.

We are left with one tormenting unknown: Why did Vladimir Putin or his apparatchiks book this tough-talking colonel on their tightly controlled state TV? They knew his views. In February, Khodaryonok warned in a newspaper column that Ukraine would fight fiercely with sophisticated NATO weaponry. “There will be no blitzkrieg in Ukraine,” he wrote. And recently he warned that Russian military mobilization won’t help in Ukraine, saying: “We don’t have the reserves, the pilots or the planes, so the mobilization would be of little help. Sending people armed with weapons of yesteryear to fight against global-standard NATO weapons would not be the right thing to do.”

So, was booking Khodaryonok just Putin’s odd way of signaling to his faithful followers about how his failed generals misled him? Is he ready to just declare victory in the Donbas region and exit the unconquerable rest of Ukraine?

While we wondered about that, guess who showed up on that same state TV show Wednesday? Yup, Col. Khodaryonok. But this was no encore; it was the sort of course correction that gets ordered from above when colonels make the mistake of generalizing. Col. Khodaryonok didn’t take back what he’d said Monday. But he was all about making sure Putin’s faithful knew Ukraine troops weren’t “having major successes” and couldn’t “launch counteroffensives.”

No doubt viewers are scratching their heads in wonder as Putin TV’s Ukraine Follies streams across news screens in Russia’s 11 time zones.

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(Martin Schram, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive. Readers may send him email at martin.schram@gmail.com.)

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