Mikhail Khodaryonok

Mikhail Mikhailovich Khodaryonok (Russian: Михаи́л Миха́йлович Ходарёнок, born February 20, 1954, in Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union) is a Russian journalist, military observer for Gazeta.ru and Vesti VM, and a Reserve colonel of the Russian Federation.

Quotes

• Nobody will meet the the Russian Army in Ukrain with bread, salt and flowers.
• The Russian arsenal is absolutely insufficient to eradicate such a state from the face of the earth.
• One should not forget that Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile crews inflicted shocking casualties on the Russian Air Force in the 2008 Georgian war.
• Of course, today the Armed Forces of Ukraine are significantly inferior to the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in terms of combat and operational capabilities. But even this army should not be taken lightly.
• The Russian army can encounter far more than just Stalingrad or Grozny in the course of a war with Ukraine.
• There will be no blitzkrieg in Ukraine.
• Overexcited Russian experts should forget their hate fantasies.
  • "3 Wochen vor dem Angriff: Russischer Ex-Oberst machte 6 Vorhersagen zum Ukraine-Krieg - alle trafen ein" (In German; "3 weeks before the attack: Russian former colonel made 6 predictions about the war against Ukraine - all came true"), Focus.de, 22 April 2022

• We shouldn't take information tranquilizers. Because sometimes information is spread about some moral and psychological breakdown in the Ukrainian armed forces, which are allegedly on the verge of some kind of crisis in moral and so on. All of that, to put it mildly, is false.
• The situation from the overall strategic position is that the Ukrainian armed forces are able to arm a million people.
• The situation in this regard for us will frankly get worse.
• The level of any army's professionalism is determined not by the number of those recruited for professional service but by the level of the personnel's training, and its morale and readiness to shed blood for the homeland.
• The main thing for our (military) business it's always to maintain a sense of military-political realism. If you go beyond it, then sooner or later the reality of history will hit you so hard that you'll regret it.
• Don't engage in sabre-rattling with missiles in Finland's direction. It actually looks quite amusing. After all, the main deficiency of our military-political position is that, in a way, we are in full geopolitical isolation and that, however much we would hate to admit this, virtually the entire world is against us. And it's that situation that we need to get out of.
  • "On a Russian talk show, retired colonel stuns colleagues by saying Ukraine invasion isn’t going well", Indian Express/New York Times, 18 May 2022