Institute for the Study of War & AEI’s Critical Threats Project 2022
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 18
Karolina Hird, Katherine Lawlor, Grace Mappes, George Barros,
and Mason Clark
October 18, 8:30pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map
is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Russian forces continued to target critical Ukrainian civilian infrastructure with
air, missile, and drone strikes on October 18. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that
Russian forces launched 19 missile strikes and 68 air strikes against over 10 areas, including Kyiv,
Zhytomyr City, Kharkiv City, Dnipro City, Kryvyi Rih, Zaporizhzhia City, Mykolaiv City, Odesa
City, and other areas in Donetsk, Kherson, and Mykolaiv Oblasts.
1
The Ukrainian General Staff
also reported that Russian forces targeted unspecified areas with 43 kamikaze drones, 38 of which
Ukrainian forces shot down.
2
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces
continued to strike Ukrainian infrastructure and military command facilities.
3
Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky stated on October 18 that Russian strikes between October 10 and
October 18 destroyed 30% of Ukrainian power stations in a likely attempt to demoralize Ukrainian
civilians that is unlikely to succeed.
4
Current and former US officials confirmed to the New York Times on October 18
that members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) are in Russian-
occupied Crimea to train Russian forces on how to use the Iranian drones they
purchased, thereby enabling likely Russian war crimes.
5
ISW had assessed on October
12 that any Iranian personnel in Ukraine were likely IRGC drone trainers.
6
The New York Times
reported that it remains unclear whether Iranian trainers are flying the drones themselves, or
merely teaching Russian forces how to do so. Russian forces have directed dozens of Iranian-made
Shahed-136 drones against civilian targets in Ukraine since mid-September, prioritizing creating
psychological terror effects on Ukrainian civilians rather than achieving tangible battlefield
effects.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unequal implementation of partial mobilization
is causing social fractures that are driving the Russian information space to further
marginalize ethnic minority communities. As ISW has previously reported, an October 15
shooting at a Belgorod Oblast training ground was likely a natural consequence of the Kremlin’s
continued policy of using poor and minority communities to bear the brunt of force generation
efforts while protecting ethnic Russians and wealthier Russian citizens.
7
Russian sources blamed
that shooting on two ethnically Tajik Russian citizens who had been forcibly mobilized.
8
The
Russian information space has largely responded with virulently xenophobic rhetoric against
Central Asian migrants and other peripheral social groups. “A Just Russia” Party Chairperson
Sergey Mironov posted a long, xenophobic critique of Russia’s migration policy on October 18,
claiming that mobilization exposed systemic fractures within the Russian immigration system.
9
Mironov blamed military commissars for allowing people who pose a threat to Russian security
into the Russian Armed Forces and accused military commissariats of keeping their doors wide
open for individuals from Central Asia. Mironov proposed a moratorium on granting Russian
citizenship to citizens of Tajikistan.
10
Mironov’s calls for immigration reform demonstrate the role
