Institute for the Study of War &
AEI’s Critical Threats Project 2022
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 16
Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, Madison Williams, Yekaterina Klepanchuk,
and Frederick W. Kagan
November 16, 6:45pm 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 sources and proxy officials are flagrantly touting the forced adoption of
Ukrainian children into Russian families. Prominent Russian milbloggers began circulating a
multi-part documentary series on November 9 featuring several Ukrainian children from Donbas after
being adopted into Russian families.
The documentary series claims that Russian officials have
evacuated over 150,000 children from Donbas in 2022 alone.
It is unclear exactly how Russian sources
are calculating this figure, and Ukrainian officials previously estimated this number to be 6,000 to
8,000.
Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov additionally stated he is working with Russian
Federation Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova to bring “difficult teenagers” from
various Russian regions and occupied Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts to Chechnya to engage in
“preventative work” and “military-patriotic education.”
Lvova-Belova has continually advocated for
deportations and adoptions of Ukrainian children and herself adopted a child from Mariupol.
Forced
adoption programs and the deportation of children under the guise of vacation and rehabilitation
schemes likely form the backbone of a massive Russian depopulation campaign that may amount to a
violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and constitute
a wider ethnic cleansing effort, as ISW has previously reported.
Ukrainian sources continued to clarify the damage caused by the massive November 15
Russian missile strike across Ukraine. The Ukrainian General Staff stated on November 16 that
Russian forces launched over 90 Kh-101 and Kalibr cruise missiles and 11 drones over the course of
November 15 and targeted critical infrastructure in a number of oblasts.
Ukrainian Air Force
Command reported that Ukrainian air defense and ground forces shot down 75 missiles and 10 Shahed-
136 drones.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin noted on November 16 that the US-provided
National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS) had a 100% success rate in intercepting
Russian missiles.
As ISW previously reported, Russian forces likely used a substantial portion of their
high-precision weapon systems in the November 15 attack.
The Russian information space largely followed the official Kremlin framing of the
missile strike on Polish territory as a Western provocation. The Russian Ministry of Defense
(MoD) stated on November 16 that Ukrainian and other foreign officials' statements about Russian
missiles in connection with the strike on Polish territory constitute a “deliberate provocation with the
aim of escalating the situation.”
Russian Deputy Chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev
accused the West of moving closer to world war by waging a hybrid attack against Russia following the
strike on Polish territory.
Russian milbloggers widely accused Western and Ukrainian officials of
trying to falsely blame Russia for the strike in order to justify increased support to Ukraine and further
escalation in Eastern Europe.
Some Russian sources also asserted that Ukrainian and Western
officials were trying to use the incident to either pressure Russia to end its coordinated missile
campaign against Ukrainian critical infrastructure or to justify sending “better” air defenses to
Ukraine.
The Russian milbloggers’ support of the Kremlin framing of the strike as a Western
