Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Russian attacks on critical infrastructure are tearing the Ukrainian capital apart, as strikes on a major bridge linking the city’s east and west brought traffic to a standstill and forced authorities to declare the city effectively on a war footing.
Klitschko said on Telegram that the capital was facing a very dramatic situation and that it was no longer possible to pretend residents could live as they did in peacetime. His warning followed another wave of strikes using fast-moving, jet-powered drones that prompted officials to fully close Kyiv’s Southern Bridge, one of eight spans crossing the Dnipro River, and restrict movement on a second crossing.
The disruption produced lengthy gridlock across the capital, with commuters abandoning vehicles or continuing on foot. One resident, a 49-year-old seamstress named Tetiana Osypenko, said she had been traveling for three hours trying to reach work, describing the bridges as impossible to cross. She said repeated disruptions to subway service during earlier air raids had previously forced her to spend a night in a metro station near the bridge.
President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of abandoning the established rules of armed conflict by authorizing large-scale attacks on civilian areas, an accusation the Kremlin has rejected. Separately, a strike on a 25-storey residential building in southeast Kyiv killed one person and wounded at least two others, while Russian shelling in the eastern city of Kharkiv killed two people and injured dozens more, according to that city’s mayor, Igor Terekhov.
Kyiv has faced near-constant aerial bombardment in recent months, with Klitschko noting that fighting since Russia’s February 2022 invasion has largely centered on ground combat in the east, leaving the capital comparatively shielded from frontline devastation until recently. Repeated strikes on trains, petrol stations and energy facilities have increasingly disrupted daily transport and raised concerns over power and heating supplies as winter approaches.
