Is Putin’s off ramp finally under construction?

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 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. 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.

The colonel warned them about the danger of being misled by official information channels that inaccurately spread false info about Ukraine’s military. Theofficer’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,” he 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. … 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.

Finally, we are left with one tantalizing unknown: Vladimir Putin surely wasn’t blindsided by Col. Khodaryonok’s views or willingness to say them on TV.

In February, before the invasion, he warned in a newspaper column that Ukraine would fight fiercely and the West would provide sophisticated weaponry. “There will be no blitzkrieg in Ukraine,” he wrote then. A couple of weeks ago, Huffpost.com reported, he warned publicly that a Russian military mobilization wouldn’t help in Ukraine.

“We don’t have the reserves, the pilots or the planes, so the mobilization would be of little help,” he reportedly said. “Sending people armed with weapons of yesteryear to fight against global-standard NATO weapons would not be the right thing to do.”

Hmmm. Perhaps we will soon be looking back and saying wisely that this week’s stunning video of the colonel telling tough-truths on state TV was our first clue that a fed-up Putin was building his own offramp — and planning a quick exit from an unconquerable Ukraine.