[4] "I saw with my own eyes how extremist those demonstrators were, attacking the police and hurling petrol bombs at them... when Yanukovych was ousted, I understood they would come here to the east to fight.

[3] Khodakovsky was strongly criticized, including by Igor Girkin, due to heavy casualties incurred in the course of Vostok's late May occupation of the Donetsk airport and early June attack on a Ukrainian border checkpoint at Marynivka.

[10][11] On 23 July 2014, the international news agency Reuters reported Khodakovsky had in an interview confirmed that pro-Russian rebels had obtained a Buk missile system, which they used to shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and then "probably" sent it back to Russia to remove proof of its presence.

[16] In November 2014, he repeated his claim that the separatists had a Buk launcher at the time, but stated that the vehicle, under control of fighters from Luhansk, had still been on its way to Donetsk when MH17 crashed.

[19] Despite this, Russian media and Khodakovsky himself made it clear that the strategically important village would be solely defended by the Vostok Brigade against elite detachments from the Ukrainian Marine Corps.

[20][21][22] Ukraine announced the liberation of the settlement on 16 August, and has been noted using artillery to shell retreating members of the Vostok Brigade resulting in high casualties among Khodakovsky's troops.

[23][24][25][26] In August 2023 Khodakovsky said that Russia would not be able to win the war militarily in the near term and that Russian forces would have difficulty occupying additional Ukrainian cities.