Russian invasion of Ukraine: Day 641

Summary for Sunday, 26th November 2023 - DAY 641

• Russia’s defence ministry says it has thwarted a major Ukrainian drone strike with at least 20 drones shot down over its regions, including Moscow. One person was injured in the city of Tula when an intercepted drone hit an apartment building, the region’s governor Alexei Dyumin said.
  
  
• Overnight, Ukraine’s military reported destroying eight of nine attack drones launched by Russia. There were no immediate reports of damage.
  
  
• Russia sent waves of kamikaze drones into Ukraine in what Kyiv claimed Saturday was the most intensive drone attack since the start of the war. Five people were wounded by falling debris, including an 11-year-old child, the mayor, Vitaliy Klitschko, said. Several buildings, including a kindergarten, were damaged and about 17,000 people in the Kyiv region were left without electricity. Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 74 of the 75 drones launched in the attack.
  
  
• The former Russian prime minister turned Kremlin critic Mikhail Kasyanov has been added to a list of “foreign agents”, Russia’s justice ministry has announced. Kasyanov who served as prime minister for the first four years of Putin’s administration, now appears in the justice ministry’s register of foreign agents, a term reminiscent of the Soviet-era “enemy of the people”. He was sacked in February 2004 and he went into opposition to the Kremlin. In 2022, Kasyanov left the country and has criticised Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
  
  
• Switzerland’s president, Alain Berset was in Kyiv and paid homage to the victims of the Holodomor famine that he said was “provoked by Soviet leaders”. Berset met with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to discuss “humanitarian demining, the use of frozen profits from the assets of the aggressor country and the peace formula”, according to Zelenskiy. Latvia’s president, Edgars Rinkēvičs, was also in Ukraine and with met the country’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal to discuss the progress of Ukraine’s integration into the EU.
  
  
• The UK Ministry of Defence reported that Russia’s Black Sea fleet is facing issues reloading its vessels with cruise missiles. Russia will, the MoD said, need to overcome such issues “in time for maritime cruise missiles to be included in any winter campaign of strikes against Ukraine”.
  
  
• Ukraine needs more air defences to protect its grain export routes as well as regions bordering Russia, president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said as he addressed an international summit on food security in Kyiv. “There is a deficit of air defence – that is no secret,” Zelenskiy told the Grain from Ukraine summit, which was attended by senior officials from European countries, including Swiss president Alain Berset and Lithuanian prime minister Ingrida Simonyte. Zelenskiy said Ukraine would be supplied by its foreign partners with vessels to accompany convoys of cargo ships from Ukraine’s ports to guarantee their security.
  
  
• A Ukrainian soldier who was posthumously awarded a medal after a widely shared video showed him declaring “Glory to Ukraine” before apparently being shot dead, was commemorated with a statue in his northern home town. The video shared in March showed a man the military later named as Oleksandr Matsievskiy, a sniper with a unit from the region of Chernihiv, saying “Slava Ukraini”, a phrase more than a century old that has become a popular expression of resistance to Russia’s February 2022 invasion. Standing smoking a cigarette in a wooded area, carrying no visible weaponry, Matsievskiy is then seen slumping to the ground, apparently struck repeatedly by unseen shooters. Kyiv blamed “brutal and brazen” Russians for his death.
  

Russia and Ukraine report downing of drones in overnight attacks

Russia puts Meta’s spokesperson on wanted list

Russia still intends to recapture the town of Kupiansk

Indeed, Russian invaders have not abandoned their intentions to attack … to advance toward the town of Kupiansk. They seek to reoccupy it. In this area, Ukrainian defenders repelled four enemy attacks. It was near Usenkivka and Ivanivka. The enemy intends to advance to the settlement of Sinkivka in order to develop their further success in the offensive on Kupiansk.

About 2,100 vehicles unable to get into Ukraine because of Polish blockade

Traffic banned on Odesa-Kyiv highway due to bad weather

70 Kilometers to Crimea: The breakthrough that could shift the war in Ukraine

International support for Kyiv is waning and calls for negotiations are growing louder. But Ukraine has now managed to establish a bridgehead on the other side of the Dnipro River. From there, its troops could advance to Crimea — and turn the tide of the war.

Lots of water, a few boats and soldiers. That's all you can see in the three photos that Volodymyr Zelensky published on the X (Twitter) platform last weekend.
The Ukrainian president's commentary was also somewhat cryptic: "The Kherson region's left bank. Our warriors. I thank them for their strength and for moving forward."
Zelensky would probably have liked to write more, but that might have jeopardized the operational security of the armed forces.
His soldiers have recently crossed the Dnipro River at several points near Kherson in the south of the country. The river that has marked the line of demarcation with the Russian army since the liberation of the city of Kherson a year ago.
The Ukrainians were able to dig themselves into a 45-kilometer (28-mile) section of the Russian-occupied territory. But exactly where these new Ukrainian positions are located remains a secret. Each of these positions could be transformed into a bridgehead with a floating pontoon, allowing tanks, artillery and other heavy equipment to be transported across the water.

Meaning of success

Zelensky needs success stories, and the advance in the south could be his last chance — before winter arrives — as part of the counteroffensive launched in June. International support for Kyiv is waning, even from the U.S. there are repeated calls for "negotiations."
Zelensky is also under pressure domestically. There is speculation in Kyiv about a conflict with army chief Valerii Zaluzhni. The general is already seen as a contender in possible presidential elections, which are supposed to take place on March 31, 2024. But the elections, and its potential candidates, remain a question mark due to the current martial law.
All that is known about the advance in the south so far is that Ukrainian naval units are active near Krynky, which is said to have been completely destroyed after continuous Russian shelling.
"The village no longer exists today because the enemy is trying to destroy the bridgeheads we hold by force," reported Serhiy Bratchuk, spokesman for Ukraine's Southern Territorial Defense Forces, said this month on Ukrainian television.

Danger for Russia

The new advance poses a serious threat to Russia. Should Ukraine expand its bridgeheads and go on the offensive, it would open up an additional front. And this would have the potential to change the course of the war: the Crimean peninsula, which Russia occupied in 2014 in violation of international law, is only 70 kilometers (43 miles) away from the eastern bank of the Dnipro.

The objective leaves no doubt: Kyiv wants to reach Crimea and cut the land connection from the peninsula to the Russian mainland.

There are no Russian fortifications on the way there that could be compared with the multiline defenses further to the northeast. If Ukraine were to achieve a breakthrough near Kherson, Russia would have to call up extensive reserves, which would lead to a significant weakening on other sections of the front.
"Against all odds, the Ukrainian defense forces have gained a foothold on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River," confirmed Andrii Yermak, head of the presidential office, recently. "Step by step, Crimea is being demilitarized. We have already covered 70% of the distance. And our counteroffensive is making progress."
The objective leaves no doubt: Kyiv wants to reach Crimea and cut the land connection from the peninsula to the Russian mainland. This would be a serious blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. Especially as the Russian army has not yet been able to capture other significant Ukrainian territories.

The right terrain

The terrain near Krynky offers a number of advantages for the Ukrainian armed forces: There are heavily wooded areas there, and further south of the town lies the Oleshky Sands National Nature Park.

Wooded areas offer more cover than the vast plains on the Zaporizhzhya front.

The Ukrainian military probably chose the attack site with this in mind. Wooded areas offer more cover than the vast plains on the Zaporizhzhya front, where the Ukrainian counteroffensive is making slow and laborious progress at best. Tanks and troop transports are easy targets for enemy drones and artillery in the open terrain.
According to the Ukrainian Marines, their troops have killed more than 1,200 Russian soldiers and wounded more than 2,200 in a series of operations to secure their position on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River. There were also 29 ammunition depots, two dozen tanks, four dozen armored combat vehicles, 89 artillery systems, watercraft, command posts and other vehicles that have been reportedly destroyed.

'Still a lot of work ahead'

According to Kyiv, the considerable losses are due to the fact that the Russian army is trying by all means to stop the Ukrainian advance. The Russians are launching up to ten counterattacks a day.
Despite this, the Ukrainians say they have pushed the Russian units back "between three and eight kilometers", as army spokeswoman Natalia Gumenjuk assured on Ukrainian television last Sunday.
"The distance varies depending on the geographical and landscape conditions on the left (eastern) bank," said the spokeswoman.
Now Russian mortars could not hit the right bank, which speaks for a certain degree of success. "But we still have a lot of work ahead of us," said Gumenjuk. The next main task of the Ukrainian armed forces will likely be to push the Russian army back further with their artillery.

Bring the pontoon

Sooner or later, Ukraine will need a pontoon bridge across the Dnipro, and this should ideally be out of range of Russian artillery. This is the only way Ukraine can bring the heavy equipment and supplies necessary for an offensive to the eastern bank.
Until now, everything, even armored vehicles, have been transported across the river in boats. In some cases, drones are also taking over the supply of food and ammunition.
"But if the Ukrainians want to achieve more, some kind of bridge is needed," explains Phillips O'Brien, historian and professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland. "And building a bridge, even a temporary one, will be very difficult because it can be attacked. It's not impossible, but it will be a big challenge."

New Ukrainian techniques

A few weeks ago, army chief Zaluzhni complained about the stalemate on the front and called for new, innovative techniques. In the south of Ukraine, the commander-in-chief's suggestion seems to have been accepted.
Drone videos show so-called mother ships flying numerous smaller drones to the deployment site. This allows the small unmanned aerial vehicles to save battery power and carry a larger warhead. They normally have a range of five to eight kilometers. But carried by the mother ship, which flies up to 30 kilometers, the small drones can operate far into the hinterland.

Ukrainian forces have increasingly begun to carry out reconnaissance and sabotage operations behind enemy lines.

They are also extremely important for reconnaissance. They provide the GPS coordinates of Russian artillery and air defense systems, which can then be eliminated with precise counterattacks. The long-range guns of the Russian units are the greatest threat to a possible bridge over the Dnipro.
At the same time, Ukrainian forces have increasingly begun to carry out reconnaissance and sabotage operations behind enemy lines. Only recently, a naval battalion is said to have destroyed a number of Russian trucks.
"This is extremely hard work, and we have had casualties," Bratchuk, spokesman for the Southern Territorial Defense Forces, said on television. "But these trucks were meant to supply the enemy with ammunition."
The interruption of Russian logistics routes is one of the most important tasks on the eastern bank of the Dnipro: one more piece in preparing for a final battle for Crimea.

Ukraine launches retaliatory drone strike on Moscow after attack on Kyiv

Ukraine overnight tried to attack Moscow with dozens of drones, Russian authorities said Sunday, just a day after Ukrainian officials reported that Russia had launched its most intense drone attack on Kyiv since the beginning of its full-scale war in 2022.



Russian air defenses brought down at least 24 drones over the Moscow region — which surrounds but does not include the capital — and four other provinces to the south and west, the Russian Defense Ministry and Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin reported in a series of Telegram updates.
Neither referenced any casualties.
Andrei Vorobyev, governor of the Moscow region, wrote on Telegram that the drone strikes damaged three unspecified buildings there, adding that no one was hurt.
One drone crashed into a 12-story apartment block in the western Russian city of Tula, about 180 kilometers (113 miles) south of Moscow, lightly wounding one resident and causing limited damage, local Gov. Aleksei Dyumin wrote on Telegram on Sunday morning.

Russian authories report that Ukraine attempted to attack Moscow overnight with dozens of drones.


The governor of the Moscow region declared that three buildings were hit and no one was hurt.

Moscow’s Vnukovo and Domodedovo airports also briefly shut down because of the drone attack, according to Russia’s state-run news agency Tass.
Both appeared to have resumed normal operation by 6 a.m. local time, according to data from international flight tracking portals.
Russian Telegram channels speculated that Ukrainian forces had deployed a previously unseen type of drone in the purported strike, pointing out some similarities to the Iranian-made weapons Moscow routinely employs in its attacks on Ukraine.

Russian Telegram channels pointed out the similarities between Ukraine’s recent drone strikes and the Iranian-made drones used by Russia.

The Russian capital has come under attack from drones regularly since May, with Russian officials blaming Ukraine.
Military analysts commented at the time that the early attacks deployed Ukrainian locally made drones which could not carry as heavy a payload as the Iranian-made Shaheds used by Russia.
As of late morning Sunday, Ukrainian officials did not acknowledge or comment on the strikes, which came a day after Russia targeted the Ukrainian capital with over 60 Shahed drones. A
t least five civilians were wounded in the hours-long assault, which saw several buildings damaged by falling debris from downed drones, including a kindergarten.
The wounded included an 11-year-old child, according to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko.
The Ukrainian air force early on Sunday said it had brought down eight of nine Shahed drones fired overnight by Russian forces.
Also on Sunday morning, the Russian Defense Ministry reported that two Soviet-made S-200 rockets fired by Kyiv were shot down over the sea of Azov, which stretches between Crimea and Ukraine’s Russian-occupied southeastern coast.

Russia typically uses Iranian-made Shahed drones.

According to local news sources, air raid sirens sounded earlier in Russian-annexed Crimea, which on Friday came under what Russian officials called a major drone attack.
Road traffic was also briefly halted on Sunday morning across the 19-kilometer (12-mile) bridge that connects Crimea to the Russian mainland.
There were no reports of casualties, and no comment from officials in Kyiv.
Elsewhere, parts of Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine were left without power following a nighttime Ukrainian strike on a thermal power plant in the Donetsk region, a Moscow-installed local official reported on Telegram Sunday.

Russian-occupied areas of Eastern Ukraine went without electricity after a thermal power plant in the Donetsk region was hit in a Ukrainian strike.

According to Denis Pushilin, who heads the province Russia illegally annexed last year, the attack on the Starobesheve plant took out the electricity in parts of the occupied cities of Donetsk and Mariupol, along with other nearby areas.
On the outskirts of Donetsk, Russian troops have continued their attempts to advance near Avdiivka, the eastern town that has been a Ukrainian stronghold and fighting hotspot since the early days of the war, according to reports by the Ukrainian General Staff and analysis by the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.
The Ukrainian General Staff on Sunday morning said Kyiv’s forces over the previous 24 hours beat back Russian assaults to the northeast, west and southwest of Avdiivka, as Moscow’s troops strain to encircle the city.

Paramedics give psychological aid to residents of a damaged apartment building following a Russian drone attack in Kyiv, Ukraine,

Several Russian bloggers also made unconfirmed claims that Ukrainian forces had begun withdrawing from the industrial zone on Avdiivka’s southern flank, although others said that Russian troops lacked complete control of the area.
These claims could not be independently verified.
Russian shelling killed two civilians in the Donetsk region on Saturday and overnight, acting Ukrainian Gov. Ihor Moroz reported on Telegram on Sunday morning.
Over that same period, Russian shells wounded one person in Ukraine’s northern Sumy province, which borders Russia, according to a Telegram update by the Ukrainian regional military command.

Why you can’t compare casualties in Ukraine and Gaza

The UN’s tally is being done with methods that are rendered meaningless in the realities of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Nevertheless, it continues to be reported as if it was the real casualty rate

A recent New York Times article has claimed that the number of women and children killed in Gaza over 46 days of Israeli attacks have exceeded the number killed in Ukraine after nearly two years of Russia’s war. As troubling as the scale of civilian suffering in Gaza is, it is simply impossible to compare this number with Ukraine. 

Screenshot of NYT’s tweet of the article

1. Gaza tolls are unconfirmed; Ukraine tolls are verified 

The casualty rate in Gaza is provided to the UN from the Gaza Ministry of Health. And although New York Times cites experts who claim that “aggregate death tolls reported by the Gaza Health Ministry have typically proved to be accurate,” they are nonetheless less rigorous than the ones provided by the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission for Ukraine.

According to Vyacheslav Likhachev, former senior fellow at the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, which was deployed to Ukraine to report on the deaths from the war with Russian proxies in eastern Ukraine since 2014, comparing tallies for Gaza and Ukraine is an “obvious manipulation.”
“Its data on losses in the Russian-Ukrainian war (on both sides of the contact line) for 2014-2022 is indeed the most complete, accurate, and reliable. It is so, because the Mission by default does not consider possible to trust the data of the official bodies of any of the parties to the conflict, and checks every message,” Likhachev says, stressing that the death tolls from the Russian proxy administrations in eastern Ukraine could be trusted no more than the Ministry of Health of the de facto Hamas government in Gaza.
“The standard of proof adopted by the Mission is very high. It requires documentary confirmation of each specific case and verification of the identity of each victim. In a situation of a low-intensity armed conflict, when field teams were able to go to the site of each shelling of a civilian object, document each case, interview the victims (in the case of those who were injured), witnesses, or close relatives of the dead – it all worked. And it was precisely because of the standard of proof that this whole system stopped working after 24 February 2022.”

2. Current UN approach in Ukraine is “inadequate”

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the previous methodology does not work anymore, as vast territories are outside of its reach, and verifying the identities in mass graves are problematic. Despite this, the UN mission continues using its old approach, “ignoring the absurdity and inadequacy of this approach,” Likhachev says.
“As a result, after making enormous efforts, it was possible to document many cases after de-occupation in Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, and later Kherson and Kharkiv oblasts. The consequences of shelling of populated areas at a distance from the front line, etc., are recorded. But, for example, the victims of the siege of Mariupol are not taken into account in these statistics at all,” Likhachev says.
He notes that the example of Mariupol is sufficient to illustrate that the UN statistics “do not really reflect anything and does not correspond to anything at all”: it is in this city that, according to some estimates, 87,000 people were killed in the first months of the Russian siege. The real number will probably always remain unknown, as the Russians are likely to conceal the true scale of their atrocities, following their Chechnya playbook.

3. Reports indicate much higher death tolls in Russia’s war against Ukraine

Let’s take the same example of the seaside city of Mariupol, which was under relentless Russian bombardment between February-May 2022. 
Ukrainian authorities say that they have confirmed 22,000 victims. Petro Andriushchenko, advisor to the mayor of Mariupol, says that this figure is based on numerous contacts that city council officials maintained with officials who remained in Mariupol. However, he believes that the actual number could be much higher.
In December 2022, the Associated Press estimated 10,300 new graves near Mariupol by analyzing satellite imagery. 

Satellite images of graves analyzed by AP

Human rights defenders give a higher estimate. The Kharkiv Human Rights Group, working with Ukrainians who managed to escape Russian-occupied Mariupol, has gathered evidence of 100,000 killed and submitted this evidence of Russia’s genocide of Mariupolites to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. 
“We were not able to establish the exact figure at that time, but we used indirect methods, based on subtracting from the total population of Mariupol those residents whose evacuation or transfer to Russian territory was confirmed, or some other data that allowed us to subtract them from the population. And we came up with a figure of about 100,000 people, meaning that these people were killed,” Mykhailo Romanov, an expert of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group said.
He noted that people in Mariupol were killed in different ways, by different methods, using different weapons, but in any case, these were murders.
Finally, the abovementioned number of 87,000 killed Mariupolites was submitted by a civic volunteer citing records of local morgues. 
While these numbers admittedly are not established through rigorous UN methods, they nevertheless point to the death tolls from Russia’s war being much higher than the UN’s 10,000 officially reported deaths of civilians in Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1535346290401345536?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1535346290401345536%7Ctwgr%5E5470d232bfc0355096d54f8aaa34b19590eb3493%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Feuromaidanpress.com%2F2023%2F11%2F26%2Fwhy-you-cant-compare-casualties-in-ukraine-and-gaza%2F

As for Ukraine’s official data, in February 2023, Ukraine’s chief war crimes prosecutor mentioned 100,000 killed civilians, more than ten times the official death toll.

4. The UN data on Ukraine casualties is being taken at face value despite the disclaimer

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission consistently voices that their data is incomplete, and the Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights notes, for instance: “OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration.”
Despite the disclaimer, Likhachev believes the mere voicing of the incomplete data has a misleading effect. 
“The Mission, of course, was told that continuing to voice these data, even with all the disclaimers that they are incomplete, that these are only those cases that the Mission was able to document, means misleading the world audience. The disclaimer remains only in the footnote to the report itself, and the ‘statistics’ rushes further into the information space, losing all these hypocritical warnings. Unfortunately, the Mission persistently continues to engage in what is essentially a manipulation of information.

This is very sad. Please do not distribute this manipulation,” the former senior fellow of the Mission advises.

Closing summary

• Russia sent waves of kamikaze drones into Ukraine on Saturday in what Kyiv claimed was the most intensive drone attack since the start of the war. Five people were wounded by falling debris, while several buildings were damaged as about 17,000 people in the Kyiv region were left without electricity. Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 74 of the 75 drones launched in the attack.
  
  
• Russia has brought down at least 24 drones over the Moscow region and three other provinces to the south and west, as well as two Ukrainian missiles over the Azov Sea. One person was injured in the city of Tula, south of Moscow, when an intercepted drone hit an apartment building.
  
  
• The Russian military death toll in Ukraine has reached almost 325,000, according to unverified estimates by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. As of 26 November, 324,830 troops have been killed since Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine began – including 1,070 over the past day.
  
  
• Russian troops continue attempts to advance near Avdiivka, with Kyiv’s forces repelling attacks to the north-east, west and south-west of the city over the past 24 hours. According to reports by the Ukrainian general staff, Russia has conducted airstrikes in support of ground operations geared toward encircling the city on the outskirts of Donetsk.
  
  
• About 2,100 vehicles are unable to get into Ukraine because of a Polish blockade. According to an update by Ukraine’s infrastructure ministry reported by the Kyiv Independent, the flow of traffic at the Dorohusk-Yahodyn crossing – usually 680 lorries a day – is now down to a few dozen every 24 hours.
  
  
• Ukraine’s arms industry boss has called for country to turn itself into the “arsenal of the free world” and provide weapons for export. Oleksandr Kamyshin aims to revive state sector and coordinate private enterprises to boost export of weapons.