International
Russian air strikes choke bridges across Dnipro River in Kyiv
Russia struck a bridge linking two sides of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv for the second successive day, officials said yesterday, part of an intensifying campaign of air attacks on infrastructure that is upending daily life.
An evening drone strike on the closed Southern Bridge was the latest in a series of attacks since Thursday that forced the full or partial suspension of traffic across it and two other bridges spanning the vast Dnipro River.
Long traffic jams snaked through the city in the morning and evening as residents struggled to adapt to the almost constant Russian drone attacks on Kyiv in recent weeks.
"We don’t know what the Russians are thinking over there, or what they’ll come up with,” said 51-year-old Larysa, speaking to Reuters on a city bus. "What will happen on Monday is anyone’s guess.”
Before the latest attack on the bridge, Mayor Vitali Klitschko held a city security council meeting to assess the risks, describing the situation in the city as "very dramatic”.
Over a third of the capital’s 3mn residents lived on the east, or "left”, bank of the Dnipro before Russia’s 2022 invasion, but the vast majority work on the western, or "right”, bank where most government institutions and companies are.
Earlier yesterday, one person was killed and two injured in a Russian drone strike that caused a fire on the upper floors of an apartment building, officials said.
In the northeastern city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-biggest, two people were killed and 32 wounded in a guided-bomb strike, according to the regional governor.
A senior Ukrainian official said the strikes on the bridges and other sensitive infrastructure appeared linked to an order by President Vladimir Putin last month to scrap constraints on Russia’s air campaign.
The order was first reported by the Financial Times.
Andriy Shevchishin, an economic analyst, said on Facebook that about 500,000 people commute from the left to the right bank daily.
Residents of the left bank have also borne some of the worst power and heating outages every winter during the war as a result of Russian strikes on energy infrastructure. One district, Troyeshchyna, had no heating for over a week last winter in sub-zero temperatures.
Memories of last winter, the worst of the war, are prominent in residents’ minds after Russia launched what was seen in Ukraine as the first salvo of an expected winter bombing campaign against power facilities supplying the capital.
Russia has since summer launched dozens of fast and relatively cheap jet-powered drones a day at Ukraine, whose defences have struggled against them.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Telegram its drones had hit a Kyiv bridge, a power station in the surrounding region, the southwestern port of Izmail and a cargo vessel. All targets were used for military purposes, it said.
Russian news agencies later quoted the ministry as saying further strikes during the day had hit a data centre in the Black Sea port of Mykolaiv and another vessel bound for Odesa.
In Russia, Ukrainian drones targeted the Lukoil refinery in Volgograd and another oil facility in Samara region, Ukraine’s military said.
Ukraine’s strikes on oil refineries in Russia, one of the world’s leading oil producers, have cost Russia 1% of its gross domestic product, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. Long lines have formed at Russian petrol stations.
Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha told reporters on Thursday that Poland, Belgium and Spain had agreed to supply 20mm rounds for cannons on Ukraine’s F-16 jet fighters, one of its most effective tools for the fight against the new, faster drones.
He said Kyiv was anticipating a possible agreement on the supply of "several million” rounds of this ammunition in the near future, but did not specify from whom.