Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 23
Kateryna Stepanenko, Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, Madison Williams, and Frederick
W. Kagan
November 23, 6:45 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.
The Russian military conducted another set of massive, coordinated missile strikes on
Ukrainian critical infrastructure in a misguided attempt to degrade the Ukrainian will to
fight. Ukrainian Air Force Command reported on November 23 that Russian forces launched 70 cruise
missiles and five drones at Ukrainian critical infrastructure targets.
Ukrainian Air Force Command
reported that Ukrainian air defenses shot down 51 of the Russian cruise missiles and all five drones.
The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces struck residential buildings, thermal power
plants, and substations in the city of Kyiv as well as in Kyiv, Vinnytsia, Lviv, and Zaporizhia oblasts.
Ukrainian, Russian, and social media sources claimed that Russian forces also struck targets in Ivano-
Frankivsk, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Cherkasy, Dnipropetrovsk, Sumy, Poltava, Kirovohrad, and
Kharkiv oblasts.
Ukrainian officials reported widespread disruptions to energy, heating, and water
supplies as a result of the Russian strikes.
ISW has previously assessed that the Russian military is still
able to attack Ukrainian critical infrastructure at scale in the near term despite continuing to deplete
its arsenal of high-precision weapons systems.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar
stated that the Russian military mistakenly believes that the destruction of energy infrastructure will
direct Ukrainian efforts to protect rear areas and divert Ukrainian attention away from the front in
eastern and southern Ukraine.
Malyar stated that Russia’s campaign against critical infrastructure will
not weaken the motivation of Ukraine’s civilian population, and the Ukrainian Security and Defense
Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov asserted that Russian missile and drone strikes will not coerce
Ukraine into negotiations.
Prominent Russian politicians continue to promote openly genocidal rhetoric against
Ukraine. Moscow City Duma Deputy and pro-Kremlin journalist Andrey Medvedev posted a long rant
to his Telegram channel on November 23 wherein he categorically denied the existence of the Ukrainian
nation, relegating Ukrainian identity to a “political orientation.”
Medvedev called Ukraine a pagan cult
of death that worships prisoner executions and called for the total “liquidation of Ukrainian statehood
in its current form.”
This rhetoric is openly exterminatory and dehumanizing and calls for the conduct
of a genocidal war against the Ukrainian state and its people, which notably has pervaded discourse in
the highest levels of the Russian political mainstream. As ISW has previously reported, Russian
President Vladimir Putin has similarly employed such genocidal language in a way that is
fundamentally incompatible with calls for negotiations.
The Kremlin has not backed down from its maximalist goals of regaining control of
Ukraine but is rather partially obfuscating Russia’s aims to mislead Western countries
into pressuring Ukraine to sue for peace. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated on
November 21 that changing the current government in Ukraine is not a goal of the Russian “special
military operation” in Ukraine, observing that Russian President Vladimir Putin “has already spoken
about this.”
Putin had said on October 26 that Ukraine has “lost its sovereignty” and come fully under
NATO’s control.
Putin’s speech at the Valdai Discussion Club on October 27 again rejected Ukraine’s
sovereignty, noting that Russia “created” Ukraine and that the “single real guarantee of Ukrainian
sovereignty” can only be Russia.
Putin has also consistently upheld his talking point that Ukraine is a
Nazi state that must be “denazified.”
Putin’s demands amount to a requirement for regime change in
Kyiv even if he does not explicitly call for it in these recent statements. The fact that Peskov refers back
to these comments by Putin makes reading any serious walking-back of Russian aims into Peskov’s
comments highly dubious.
