Russian invasion of Ukraine: Day 635

Summary for Monday, 20th November 2023 - DAY 635

• A Ukrainian soldier and a woman have died after a grenade exploded in a Kyiv apartment, police in the Ukrainian capital have said, but the cause of the blast, which injured a second man, was not immediately clear.
  Explosives technicians and investigators were working at the scene of Sunday’s explosion in the Dniprovskiy district, Kyiv police said in a statement.
  
  
• The Ukrainian army said it had pushed back Russian forces “three to eight kilometres” from the banks of the Dnipro River, which if confirmed would be the first meaningful advance by Kyiv’s forces months into a disappointing counteroffensive. Ukrainian and Russian forces have been entrenched on opposite sides of the vast waterway in the southern Kherson region for more than a year, after Russia withdrew its troops from the western bank last November.
  
  
• A Ukrainian teenager who was taken to Russia from the occupied city of Mariupol during the war and prevented from leaving earlier this year has returned to Ukraine. Bohdan Yermokhin, who turned 18 on Sunday, appealed to Zelenskiy this month to help bring him back to Ukraine. “I believed I would be in Ukraine, but not on this day,” Yermokhin told Reuters while eating at a petrol station after crossing the border.
  
  
• About 3,000 mostly Ukrainian trucks, including those carrying fuel and humanitarian aid, were stuck on the Polish side of the border on Sunday due to a more than 10-day blockade by Polish truckers, Ukrainian authorities said.
  Polish truckers earlier this month blocked roads to three border crossings with Ukraine to protest against what they see as government inaction over a loss of business to foreign competitors since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
  
  
• Air defence units in Moscow intercepted a drone targeting the city late Sunday, mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. Sobyanin, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said units in the Elektrostal district in the capital’s east had intercepted the drone. No casualties or damage were initially reported. Air defences had also thwarted a drone attack on the Russian capital overnight to Sunday, authorities said earlier.
  
  
• Russia launched 20 Iranian-made Shahed drones targeting Kyiv and the Cherkasy and Poltava regions overnight into Sunday, the Ukrainian military said, of which 15 were shot down. The overnight strikes on Kyiv were the second attack on the Ukrainian capital in 48 hours, said the city’s military administration spokesperson, Serhii Popko.
  
  
• Five people including a three-year-old girl were injured in Russian artillery shelling of Kherson on Sunday morning, the Ukrainian interior minister, Ihor Klymenko, said. “All of them sustained shrapnel wounds. The child and the grandmother were walking in the yard. Enemy artillery hit them near the entrance,” Klymenko said on the Telegram messaging app.
  
  
• The pro-war Russian nationalist Igor Girkin, who is in custody awaiting trial for inciting extremism, said he wanted to run for president even though he understood the March election would be a “sham” with the winner already clear. Girkin, who is also known by the alias Igor Strelkov, has repeatedly said Russia faces revolution and even civil war unless President Vladimir Putin’s military top brass fight the war in Ukraine more effectively. A former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer who helped Russia to annex Crimea in 2014 and then to organise pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine, Girkin said before his arrest that he and his supporters were entering politics.
  

US defence secretary visits Kyiv

Two killed by Russian shelling in Kherson, Ukrainian authorities say

The Kremlin said on Monday it regretted Finland’s decision to shut crossings on its border with Russia, saying it reflected Helsinki’s adoption of an anti-Russian stance

The Kremlin, facing the prospect of a European Union ban on imports of Russian diamonds, said on Monday that EU sanctions tended to have a “boomerang effect” on those who applied them

Nato supports Bosnia’s territorial integrity and is concerned by “malign foreign interference,” including by Russia, in the volatile Balkans region that went through a devastating war in the 1990s

A public street protest in Moscow, led by wives of deployed Russian soldiers, on 7 November, was likely the first such demonstrations in the Russian capital since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last February

The protestors gathered in the central Teatralnya Square and unfurled banners demanding the rotation of their partners away from the frontline.
Since February 2022, social media has provided daily examples of Russian wives and mothers making online appeals protesting against the conditions of their loved ones’ service.
However, Russia’s draconian legislation has so far prevented troops’ relatives from coalescing into an influential lobbying force, as soldiers’ mothers did during the Afghan-Soviet War of the 1980s.
Police broke up the Teatralnya Square protest within minutes. However, the protestors’ immediate demand is notable.
The apparently indefinitely extended combat deployments of personnel without rotation is increasingly seen as unsustainable by both the troops themselves and by their relatives.

Here are some images from Kherson following reported Russian shelling

The bodies of 94 Ukrainian soldiers were returned to territory controlled by the Ukrainian government on Monday

Finland’s president, Sauli Niinisto, has said it had become impossible to return asylum seekers who do not meet the criteria for protection, and that this had to be taken into account when policies are set

Ukraine sacks two high-ranking cyber defence officials

Mariupol orphan returned from Russia writing songs in support of AFU

Bohdan Yermokhin, who has recently returned to Ukraine from Russia, where he had been illegally deported by the occupiers, has created a collection of songs in support of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).

Thousands of Russians fighting for a Ukrainian passport

At least 11,000 Ukrainian children are reportedly being detained at 43 re-education camps across Russia, says MoD

Ukrainian Marines destroy Russian trucks on Oleshky-Nova Kakhovka road in east-bank Kherson Oblast

Ukrainian Marines managed to destroy several Russian trucks on the Oleshky-Nova Kakhovka highway in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast, spokesperson for the Ukrainian Volunteer Army South Serhiy Bratchuk told Espreso channel on Nov. 20.
The enemy trucks were destroyed by the 501st separate marine battalion.
"This is extremely hard work, and there were losses (on the Ukrainian side)," said Bratchuk.
“But these trucks were supposed to supply the enemy with ammunition, and now they have been completely destroyed.”
Disruption of these Russian logistics routes is one of the tasks of the Ukrainian military on the east bank of Kherson Oblast, he said.
"We need to be very careful when talking about the left (east) bank, but we are saying what can be said. These events are happening and will continue in the near future," Bratchuk said.
Raids, reconnaissance and sabotage actions are taking place in the region, resulting in losses in personnel and equipment for the Russian army, he explained.
"As for the village of Krynky, it practically does not exist today, because the enemy is trying to destroy the bridgeheads held by our Marines. Heavy fighting continues," Bratchuk said.
The Russians are using everything they have for firepower, including military aviation, but Ukrainian forces are holding their ground.
Counter-battery fighting is currently taking place not only between the west bank and the east bank, but "the bridgeheads of the left (east) bank can also respond to the enemy."

Development on the east bank of Kherson Oblast

Since mid-October, U.S.-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War or ISW has been reporting on the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ advances on the east bank of the Dnipro River in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast.
Earlier reports indicated a breakthrough across the Dnipro River into the occupied part of the region near the town of Oleshky.
It was previously suggested that judging by the reaction of Russian war correspondents, this operation could be more significant than earlier similar raids by the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
In late October, ISW reported a Ukrainian advance towards the village of Krynky. On Nov. 10, the think tank subsequently reported that the Ukrainian foothold may have expanded, cutting an important road from Nova Kakhovka to Oleshky.
Andriy Yermak, the head of the President’s Office, confirmed on Nov. 13 that the Ukrainian Armed Forces had seized a foothold on the east bank of the Dnipro River.

Closing summary

• At least 11,000 Ukrainian children are reportedly being detained at 43 re-education camps across Russia, thousands of miles from home, the UK’s Ministry of Defence said on X.
  
  
• Russia may begin full mobilisation after the 2024 Russian presidential election on 17 March, secretary of the national security and defence council of Ukraine, Oleksii Danilov, has suggested.
  
  
• Volodymyr Zelenskiy has met Fox Corp CEO, Lachlan Murdoch, in the Ukrainian capital in what Kyiv said was a “very important signal” of support. “The Head of State (Zelenskiy) thanked Lachlan Murdoch for his visit and emphasised that it is a very important signal of support at the time when the world’s attention is blurred by other events,” the president’s office wrote.
  
  
• Ukraine sacked two senior cyber defence officials on Monday, a government official said, as prosecutors announced a probe into alleged embezzlement in the government’s cybersecurity agency.
  
  
• US secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, met with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in an unannounced visit to Kyiv, and said that American support to Ukraine would continue “for the long haul”, the Associated Press reported. Zelenskiy said Austin’s visit was “a very important signal for Ukraine.” “We count on your support,“ he added, thanking Congress as well as the American people for their backing. Austin announced $100m in new military aid to Ukraine during his visit.
  
  
• Russian shelling killed three people on Monday and damaged power lines and a gas pipeline in the central Dnipropetrovsk and southern Kherson regions of Ukraine, authorities said. An elderly woman was killed and a man injured in Russian artillery strike on the town of Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk’s governor said.
  “A power line and a gas pipeline were damaged,” Serhiy Lysak, the governor, said on Telegram. On Monday morning, two drivers were killed when Russian forces shelled a private transport company parking lot in Kherson, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said. These claims have not been independently verified.