Russia strikes second major Kyiv bridge as infrastructure attacks intensify

On Saturday morning, Russian drones struck the Pivnichnyi Bridge, the second major crossing in Kyiv to be hit within days. The attack injured two people and tore into the road surface and the overhead wires that power the city's trolleybuses, forcing traffic to back up across the span. Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko announced the strike on Telegram as emergency services mobilized, noting that the bridge's westbound lanes had been closed.

The two bridges—the Pivnichnyi and the Pivdennyi, which sits to the south—cross the Dnipro River and form the only major road and rail connections between Kyiv's eastern and western halves. Until Thursday of that week, neither had been targeted. Now both had been struck repeatedly. The damage severed not just vehicle traffic but also the rail lines and trolleybus routes that move people across the river. A second day of traffic gridlock settled over the capital, though not quite as severe as Friday's paralysis. The city's roughly three million residents, many of whom depend on the metro to navigate Kyiv's width, now faced a new vulnerability: the possibility that Moscow's strategy would be to keep hammering these bridges until the city was effectively cut in two.

Russia's military claimed the drones had targeted the bridges because they were used to move Ukrainian troops and military cargo. The Kremlin also issued another call for foreign nationals, including diplomats, to evacuate Kyiv. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky framed the assault differently. In an interview with the Financial Times, he said Putin had decided there were "no rules now" in how Russia would wage war. The Russians had failed to occupy Ukraine by force, Zelensky explained, so they had shifted to a campaign of mass destruction—not just bridges, but data centers, internet infrastructure, mobile networks, hospitals, schools, universities. "They want people to flee their cities," he said.

Experts cautioned that Russian drones alone were unlikely to collapse the bridges outright. But the repeated strikes would force closures for inspection and repair, and each impact risked weakening the structures further. Some of Kyiv's bridges were already in poor condition, having carried far heavier traffic for far longer than their original design intended. More destructive weapons—cruise missiles, for instance—could bring them down entirely. Ukrainian lawmakers had apparently begun contingency planning: discussions had taken place about using ferries and temporary pontoon bridges to maintain some connection across the Dnipro if the main crossings were destroyed.

Klitschko, speaking after the Pivdennyi Bridge was attacked earlier in the week, had warned that Kyiv was now in a "very dramatic situation." Moscow was battering the city's critical infrastructure, its logistics networks, its housing stock, and other essential systems. The defense council had convened a crisis meeting on Friday to assess the damage and coordinate response.

Russian President Vladimir Putin justified the campaign as retaliation for Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries and naval vessels in the Black Sea. At the Valdai foreign policy forum on Thursday, he said Russia had been receiving calls to stop the attacks but insisted Ukraine had started this escalation. He acknowledged that Ukraine's refinery strikes had achieved some results and that Russia had lost roughly 1% of its GDP to the damage. Ukraine, for its part, maintained that it had begun targeting Russian oil infrastructure precisely because those facilities fund the Kremlin's war effort.

The strikes extended beyond Kyiv's bridges. On Saturday, a sailor aboard a Liberian-flagged civilian vessel was killed and three crew members wounded when Russian forces attacked a port facility in the Odesa region. At least twelve people were injured in overnight Russian strikes across the Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, and Kyiv regions. In the eastern Luhansk region, which Russia occupies, a Russian drone attack killed two people and injured three, according to the Moscow-installed regional administrator. Moldova, Ukraine's southwestern neighbor, reported that five Russian drones and missiles had crossed its airspace and detonated near populated areas in four districts, though no casualties were reported there.

The pattern was clear: Russia was widening and intensifying its assault on Ukrainian infrastructure and civilian targets. The bridges of Kyiv had become a focal point—symbols of the city's connectivity and, now, symbols of Moscow's determination to sever it.