Russia Strikes a Second Major Bridge in Kyiv
A Russian strike on Saturday morning damaged the road surface and the trolleybus overhead wires on Kyiv’s Northern Bridge, the mayor said — the second major crossing to be hit in days. The Southern Bridge has been targeted repeatedly since Thursday, with all metro and vehicle traffic suspended across it. Vitali Klitschko has said such attacks are “tearing Kyiv apart”.
Kyiv sits on both banks of the Dnipro with only a handful of crossings, so attacking them is an attempt to cut a city of three million in half rather than merely to darken it. The Northern Bridge carries trolleybuses as well as cars, which is why damage to overhead wires matters as much as damage to the road. Mr Klitschko told the city’s defence council this week that “we’re talking about survival”. The defensive problem is specific: an acute shortage of Patriot interceptors, against a newer generation of jet-powered drones that are harder to bring down. About half a million people commute from the left bank to the right every day, which is the number that makes this an economic attack as well as a military one. On the ground the war is moving the other way: Putin told the Valdai forum that Russia seized 1,301 square kilometres in September, while the Institute for the Study of War assesses a net Russian loss of 80.81 — a gap it describes as so far from reality as to resemble hallucination. Watch whether a third crossing is hit, because two is an inconvenience and three begins to look like a siege.