Russia struck Kyiv's Northern Bridge across the Dnipro River on Saturday morning, extending a three-day campaign against the capital's river crossings that has paralysed traffic and deepened fears of a winter assault aimed at making life in the city untenable.
Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the strike damaged the bridge's road surface and the overhead trolleybus cables, forcing the suspension of traffic from the eastern left bank to the western right bank. Emergency services were deployed to the scene. No casualties were reported.
Third day of bridge strikes
Saturday's attack followed repeated drone strikes on the Southern Bridge on October 1 and 2. According to the Institute for the Study of War, Russian forces launched four waves of drone strikes against the Southern Bridge between the afternoon of October 1 and the evening of October 2, in an effort, ISW assessed, to degrade the structure and "to make life difficult in the Ukrainian capital."
Russia's defence ministry said it had struck a road-rail bridge across the river during the night of October 1 to 2, and later said its drones had hit the Northern Bridge to disrupt military logistics — a claim Ukrainian officials reject, describing the crossings as overwhelmingly civilian infrastructure. On Friday, the Southern Bridge was fully closed, and traffic across Kyiv's other Dnipro bridges was blocked or severely restricted.
Explosions were reported shortly after 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, with video showing a large blast on the Northern Bridge as vehicles crossed. Kyivpastrans, the city transport operator, warned of delays to several bus and trolleybus routes as closures rippled across the network.
Why the crossings matter
Kyiv is a city divided by water. Of its roughly three million residents before the full-scale invasion, more than a third lived on the left bank, while most government institutions, offices and services sit on the right bank. Around 500,000 people commute from one side to the other each day.
Even the temporary loss of a single crossing therefore has outsized effects, funnelling traffic onto the remaining bridges and stranding commuters. Klitschko, speaking after a city security council meeting, called the situation "very dramatic" and wrote that the capital could "no longer pretend that life can go on as it did in peacetime."
"The enemy is tearing Kyiv apart — destroying infrastructure, critical infrastructure, logistics networks, housing and social facilities," he said, promising that the city would "hold firm."
Part of a wider winter campaign
Ukrainian officials place the bridge strikes inside a broader Russian plan to collapse Ukraine's energy system this winter. Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal has shared with European partners a document, first reported by the New York Times, describing a campaign of up to 1,000 missiles, drones and bombs against substations, power plants and water infrastructure, including strikes near Ukraine's three operating nuclear plants intended to disconnect them from the grid.
ISW has separately assessed that President Vladimir Putin, frustrated by stalled battlefield gains in the east, is increasingly relying on long-range strikes to coerce Ukraine into surrender over the winter of 2026–27. In Kyiv, residents describe a daily reality of air alerts, shelters and gridlock. One mother told reporters she spent two hours in a school shelter with her son during an alert the day after a nearby school was hit, saying she can no longer plan anything.
What remains unclear
Whether Russia can sustain the tempo needed to put a major reinforced bridge beyond repair is an open question. ISW noted on October 1 that seriously damaging structures of this scale requires repeated, precise strikes over a short period. For now Moscow appears content with a lesser but still punishing effect: a capital whose arteries are cut, hour by hour, at the start of winter.
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