Kyiv’s Northern Bridge hit by a Russian air strike, the third straight day of attacks on bridges

On Saturday morning, shortly after 6:30 Kyiv time, a Russian air strike hit the Northern Bridge over the Dnipro River in the Ukrainian capital. Mayor Vitali Klitschko announced the strike via Telegram, as Reuters reports.

Emergency services were sent to the scene immediately. Traffic across the bridge from the eastern to the western bank was suspended after the road surface and the overhead trolleybus wires were damaged. According to official reports, there were no casualties.

This is the third straight day of Russian attacks on Kyiv’s bridges: over the last two days, the Southern Bridge was hit several times by Russian drones, forcing the temporary suspension of traffic across it, as well as across two other bridges over the wide Dnipro River.

More than a third of the capital’s 3 million residents lived on the eastern, or “left”, bank of the Dnipro before Russia’s 2022 invasion, but the overwhelming majority of them work on the western, “right”, bank, where most government institutions and companies are concentrated — around 500,000 people cross every day from the left bank to the right. Klitschko described the situation as “very dramatic”, saying Russian attacks are “destroying Kyiv piece by piece”, while President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Vladimir Putin of ordering his commanders in September to abandon the rules of war.

Moscow has previously denied systematically targeting civilians in its bombing campaigns. Meanwhile, memories of last winter, the worst of the war, remain alive in residents’ minds, after Russia last week launched what was seen in Ukraine as the first barrage of an expected winter bombing campaign against energy facilities supplying the capital.