Russia has a new target on its rapidly growing list of Ukrainian infrastructure to bomb: bridges.
Over the past three days, Russia has attacked bridges in the capital, Kyiv, six times. Three drones hit one in the city’s south on Thursday, and the same bridge was struck twice on Friday. On Saturday morning, another attack hit a bridge in the north.
The structures still stand, but the damage and the threat of more attacks have prompted the local authorities to restrict or stop traffic on five of the capital’s six road bridges. That has severely disrupted daily life in Ukraine’s largest city, which, like much of the country, is bisected by the broad Dnipro River.
Many in Kyiv commute between the mostly residential eastern bank, home to roughly a million people, and the western bank, where most government offices and businesses are located.
The bridges are the latest target in a sweeping Russian strike campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure that is far from the front lines. That campaign has expanded in recent weeks to include warehouses, trains, data centers, medical depots and steel factories and comes on top of an intense assault on Ukraine’s power grid that Russia plans to escalate this winter.
The goal, Ukrainian officials and military experts say, is to devastate Ukraine’s economy — and the country’s ability to sustain the war effort — while breaking the population’s will to fight by making everyday life increasingly difficult.
Ukraine has withstood other such campaigns since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. But a critical shortage of air defenses coupled with Moscow’s growing arsenal of weapons now leaves the country more vulnerable than ever to such attacks.
“The enemy is destroying Kyiv,” the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko said in a social media post on Friday. “It is no longer possible to pretend that we can live as we did in peacetime!”
Mr. Klitschko’s message echoed a feeling that has grown across the capital in recent weeks: The relative safety Kyiv enjoyed through most of the war — demonstrated by crowded cafes and nail salons — is over.
Drones now buzz over the city all day, setting off near-constant air raid alerts. People caught outside during an attack can be seen checking phone apps that track the drones’ flight paths. On Monday, a drone hit a university in the city center and set the building ablaze, shocking residents of a neighborhood that had been spared Russian attacks for most of the war.
The assault on Kyiv’s bridges could disrupt life even more. Officials temporarily shut the northern bridge after Saturday’s attack, closed the southern bridge to cars and the metro, and limited traffic on three other bridges.
The first attack on the southern bridge, on Thursday, happened as a metro train was crossing the bridge. No one was injured, but service across the bridge was suspended. On Friday evening, residents crossing the bridge on foot watched as another drone struck it, according to a video posted on social media.
Destroying the bridges would be difficult. They are large concrete structures that would need to be hit multiple times to be taken down. Ukraine’s own attacks on Russian bridges have yielded mixed results. The Kerch Bridge, which connects the illegally annexed Crimean Peninsula to Russia, closed temporarily several times after attacks but was never knocked out.
Still, attacks could weaken the bridges’ supporting structures and prompt the authorities to close them indefinitely rather than risk a collapse.
The result would be a logistical nightmare for Kyiv and the whole country. Bridges in the capital carry all kinds of food and equipment across the Dnipro River, which runs north to south through Ukraine and splits the country in two. There would be few alternatives if they closed.
One road bridge crosses the river north of Kyiv. To the south, the nearest is about 90 miles away, a roughly 2.5-hour drive. More bridges lie farther downriver, but using them would mean a long detour, and their proximity to the southern front leaves them even more exposed to Russian attacks.
In the early days of the war, Ukrainian officials considered blowing up Kyiv’s bridges to halt Russian troops closing in on the eastern bank. They held off as counterattacks eventually succeeded in routing the Russian forces advancing from the east.
Dzvinka Pinchuk contributed reporting.
The post Russia Turns to Striking Kyiv’s Bridges, Threatening a Vital Lifeline appeared first on New York Times.
