ISW Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October, 29, 2024

Key Takeaways from the ISW:

• The rate of Russian advances in Ukraine has increased in recent weeks but remains slow and consistent with positional warfare rather than with rapid mechanized maneuver—emphasizing how generally stagnant Russian advances have been after over two and half years of war.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to use an annual Russian nuclear deterrence exercise to further boilerplate nuclear saber-rattling information operations that aim to influence Western decision making.
• Recent Russian polling suggests that Russian domestic support for local government entities has somewhat declined over the past year, most likely in response to increased crypto-mobilization force generation efforts at the regional level.
• Russian officials and milbloggers are conducting information operations that falsely portray the Georgian opposition's peaceful and legal challenges to the conduct of the October 26 parliamentary election results as a Western- and Ukrainian-sponsored illegal coup d'état.
• The Georgian protests have been peaceful and legal - far from the Russian claims of an illegal coup.
• These concerted Russian efforts to baselessly discredit the Georgian pro-Western opposition and civil society are part of a common Kremlin tactic aimed at framing the valid and legal concerns of pro-Western political entities in the post-Soviet space as illegitimate and violent.
• Ukrainian forces recently advanced in Toretsk, and Russian forces made advanced near Kupyansk, Pokrovsk, Kurakhove, and southwest of Donetsk City.
• The Russian Ministry of Defense (MOD) continues to rely on Russia's prison population to replace depleted Russian units on the frontline.

Authors: Nicole Wolkov, Kateryna Stepanenko, Angelica Evans, Davit Gasparyan, and Frederick W. Kagan.

See the original here.