The Russian commander of the “Vostok” Battalion fighting in southern Ukraine said on Thursday that Ukraine will not be defeated and suggested that Russia freeze the war along current frontlines.
Alexander Khodakovsky made the candid concession yesterday on his Telegram channel after Russian forces, including his own troops, were devastatingly defeated by Ukrainian marines earlier this week at Urozhaine in the Zaporizhzhia-Donetsk regional border area.
“Can we bring down Ukraine militarily? Now and in the near future, no,” Khodakovsky, a former official of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, said yesterday.
“When I talk to myself about our destiny in this war, I mean that we will not crawl forward, like the [Ukrainians], turning everything into [destroyed] Bakhmuts in our path. And, I do not foresee the easy occupation of cities,” he said.
What part of this is incorrect?
The Kyiv Post is quoting Alexander Sergeevich Khodakovsky from his telegram channel, the Russian commander of the pro-Russian Vostok Battalion. He was involved in the uprising in Donetsk back in 2014 and continues to this day to be involved in the Ukrainian war.
https://t.me/s/aleksandr_skif?before=2851
In this case, they are quoting a primary source. So irrespective of your opinion of their journalistic integrity, this appears to be factual information.
Here’s another source from Reuters that discusses the Ukrainian Marines retaking Urozhaine:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-says-recaptures-urozhaine-donetsk-region-russian-forces-2023-08-16/
This is a typical poisoning the well ad hominem.
If you’re curious, this is the full telegram translation from DeepL:
Can we militarily bring down Ukraine? Right now and in the short term, no. When I reason in myself about our victory in this war - I don’t mean that we will crawl forward like them, turning everything into bahmuts on our way. And I don’t envision the easy occupation of cities… We will enter the phase that is most disadvantageous for Ukraine in its “self-styled” state: the phase of neither peace nor war. We could be in this phase if, instead of the SWO, we recognized the territories and officially took them under guardianship. But that would be a completely different turn of history…
In our reality, which has already taken place, it will come to a “truce”. We have started certain processes in the economy, caused by the increased load, but in general we have endured and caught the balance. We are balancing - not without that - but we are walking on a tightrope. Remember the crisis of the eighth year, which was called the crisis of the banking system? Back then, just one bank collapsed, setting off the domino principle, and we experienced a lot of bad things in a fairly short period of time. Now there is systematic pressure, but we are warming up, but we are holding on.
It will not be the same with Ukraine. If we don’t let the internal situation in Russia to rock, we have a very high survivability with all our ailments. Ukraine is a completely different “physics”. Economically and politically, it is a construct that cannot survive on its own. That is why the project of independent Ukraine was not realized and turned into a project of “who to lie under”. Unfortunately, the elites oriented to Western money defeated the elites who wanted to milk Russia. Now the West gives mostly what can only bring destruction. When you read about the next aid, what you see is not money that you can saw, but iron that you have to dispose of. You can’t make much money from it. Therefore, at the end of the upcoming phase, we will most likely face a global redivision of Ukraine. Translated with DeepL https://www.deepl.com/app/?utm_source=android&utm_medium=app&utm_campaign=share-translation
Let’s start with the fact that he’s not some top Russian commander, and he’s not even part of the actual Russian military. He’s one of the commanders of the militias who’ve been fighting against the regime. the article is clearly misrepresenting his position and authority.
Meanwhile, these little villages change sides pretty much every day of the conflict. You can see on the pro Ukrainian map how small this place is and that it’s not even close to Russian defensive lines https://liveuamap.com/#
Perhaps you can explain why you think this is a significant event here. Seems like this is a much bigger deal https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/10/europe/kupyansk-ukraine-evacuation-russia-intl/index.html
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-6-2023
Well according to the Institute for the Study of War, he is the current commander of the Vostok battalion in Donetsk. A lot of people reject the idea that the so-called rebellion in danetsk and luhansk was a grassroots movement, and was instead orchestrated by the Russian GRU and FSB to whittle away at Ukraine.
Therefore, that would lend credence to the idea that Khodakovsky is in fact a Russian commander, despite the fact that he was born in Donetsk. He did however relocate to Russia after 2018 before returning for the war.
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I am less interested in the details of this particular event, as I am more concerned about the truth. I merely provided alternative sources of information that cross-referenced and corroborated the material in the article as being mostly true.
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As for a Kupyansk, I’m not at all surprised because as you say, there has been give and take along the border for the entire duration of the war. And since Russia still has its inventory a large amount of artillery, any town is at risk of attack.
ISW is a propaganda outlet run by Vicky Nuland, so if that’s where you get your information from that explains a lot about your world view. The fact that a lot of people in the west guzzle propaganda isn’t really an argument.
Therefore, you you should stick to actual facts of the situation instead of making stuff up.
If you were concerned about the truth then you wouldn’t be pretending that the uprising in Donetsk was somehow orchestrated when there’s a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Let’s take a look at a few slides from this lecture that Mearsheimer gave back in 2015 to get a bit of background on the subject. Mearsheimer is certainly not pro Russian in any sense, and a proponent of US global hegemony. First, here’s the demographic breakdown of Ukraine:
here’s how the election in 2004 went:
this is the 2010 election:
As we can clearly see from the voting patterns in both elections, the country is divided exactly across the current line of conflict. Furthermore, a survey conducted in 2015 further shows that there is a sharp division between people of eastern and western Ukraine on which economic bloc they would rather belong to:
The reality is that the population in these areas is largely ethnic Russian and after US sponsored coup regime started doing things like banning Russian language, these people rebelled against it.
Furthermore, here’s what CNN was reporting the regime doing in Donbas back in 2014 https://twitter.com/paulius60/status/1611148483859255296
Here’s an article from the human rights watch https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-cluster-munitions
And here’s a whole documentary of the atrocities these people suffered https://yewtu.be/watch?v=bN68OfFKaWs
Pretending this was somehow orchestrated as opposed to directly caused by the oppression of the regime is the height of dishonesty. Which is pretty weird to see coming out from somebody who seeks the truth.
Plenty of western experts have been talking about this for many decades. This only became controversial to mention after the war started. Here’s what Chomsky has to say on the issue recently:
https://truthout.org/articles/us-approach-to-ukraine-and-russia-has-left-the-domain-of-rational-discourse/
https://truthout.org/articles/noam-chomsky-us-military-escalation-against-russia-would-have-no-victors/
Except Russia made many kilometres of progress there and Ukraine is now evacuating from the area. That’s not give and take, that’s Ukrainian position collapsing. Russia isn’t evacuating anybody at any single point that Ukraine was trying to break through for the past 10 weeks.
A leftie citing a Realist. Then Chomsky, the serial genocide denier larping as an Anarchist you must be American he’s a persona non grata in Europe. In a sense also a realist in the sense of “no chess piece country is ever doing anything and everything bad that ever happens is due to the CIA because what the other players are doing is always good”.
Now I have my issues with Kraut but watch this.