Institute for the Study of War &
AEI’s Critical Threats Project 2022
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 17
Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, Yekaterina Klepanchuk, and Frederick W. Kagan
November 17, 7:45pm 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 conducted another massive wave of missile strikes across Ukraine on
November 17. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops launched five airstrikes and
25 cruise missile strikes at civilian infrastructure objects in Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Kharkiv,
Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Mykolaiv oblasts throughout the day.
Ukrainian Air Force Command
noted that Ukrainian air defense forces destroyed four cruise missiles, five Shahed-136 drones, and two
Kh-59 guided missiles.
Russian forces conducted the largest missile attack since the start of the war on
November 15, and as ISW has previously assessed, such missile campaigns are consuming Russia’s
already depleted store of precision munitions.
Russian forces in eastern Kherson Oblast are likely partially vulnerable to a Ukrainian
interdiction campaign such as the one Ukrainian forces successfully exploited to retake
western Kherson Oblast. Several major ground lines of communication (GLOCs) run through
eastern Kherson Oblast into other Russian-controlled areas in southern Ukraine: the southern T2202
Nova Kahkovka-Armiansk route, the southeastern P47 Kakovkha-Henichesk route, and the M14
highway that runs eastward into Melitopol, Berdyansk, and Mariupol. Geolocated satellite imagery
indicates that Russian troops are establishing defensive positions along some of these critical GLOCs,
and social media reporting indicates that Ukrainian strikes have already begun targeting Russian
concentration areas and military assets on these routes.
The limited number of high-quality roads and
railways in this area, particularly connecting Crimea to the mainland, creates potential bottlenecks that
could be vulnerable to Ukrainian interdiction efforts that would gradually degrade the Russian ability
to continue supplying its grouping in eastern Kherson Oblast and other areas of southern Ukraine. ISW
previously reported the targeting of similar bottlenecks along key GLOCS--not just the bridges across
the Dnipro River--during Ukraine’s Kherson counteroffensive in late August to mid-October
culminated in the Russian withdrawal from the west bank of Kherson Oblast to positions further south
of the Dnipro River. Ukrainian forces will likely find it harder to achieve such dramatic effects in eastern
Kherson but may be able to disrupt Russian efforts to solidify and hold their new defensive lines.
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree changing the composition of the
Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights (HRC) on November
17.
The decree notably expels four Russian human rights activists, including Ekaterina Vinokurova,
who wrote a piece criticizing the rise of “patriotic” Telegram channels and nationalist milbloggers who
have cornered the information space against opposition outlets who deviate from the predominant
Kremlin line of the war in Ukraine.
Russian media previously reported that Vinokurova and other
members of the HRC appealed to the Russian Investigative Committee to look into the widely circulated
video of the execution of a former Wagner Group fighter who reportedly defected to Ukraine.
Putin’s
new appointees to the HRC include a slate of Russian political and proxy members and notably Sasha
Kots, a prominent milblogger and war correspondent who has been heavily involved in covering
Russian operations in Ukraine.
Kots most recently called for Russia to maintain massive missile strikes
against critical Ukrainian infrastructure on November 17.
This decree likely represents the Kremlin’s
