Russian drones hit Kyiv's Southern Bridge for second straight day, closing key river crossing

Russian drones struck Kyiv's Pivdennyi (Southern) Bridge for the second consecutive day on Friday, forcing the closure of a crossing that carries both road traffic and one of the capital's two metro lines over the Dnipro River, as Russia pressed an intensifying campaign of strikes on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure ahead of winter.

The bridge, which had already been damaged a day earlier, was hit four times within 24 hours, according to Kyiv officials, and was shut in both directions to vehicles and to the Syretsko-Pecherska metro line that runs across it. A second Dnipro crossing, the Paton Bridge, was restricted to one-way traffic as a precaution. Across the country, Russian strikes also hit an apartment building in Kyiv, killing at least one person, along with residential buildings in Kramatorsk and Sumy, a kindergarten in Kherson, a grocery store in Kharkiv, and port facilities at Izmail in Odesa region.

The numbers

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia launched more than 100 attack drones at Ukraine overnight, nearly half of them jet-powered variants, which fly faster than the propeller-driven Shahed-type drones Russia has relied on for most of the war, along with cruise missiles aimed at the capital's power and transport networks. Ukrainian air defenses destroyed most of them, officials said, but enough got through to disable an electrical substation in the Kyiv region and gridlock the city, with commuters reporting delays of three hours or more as traffic was funneled onto the capital's remaining bridges.

The attack is one episode in a much larger pattern. Ukraine's state gas producer has said its wells and processing plants have been struck several hundred times already in 2026, more than in 2025 and the first three years of the full-scale invasion combined, as Moscow targets gas and power infrastructure months before households typically need heat. The European Commission says it has committed roughly €3 billion to shoring up Ukraine's energy system since the invasion began, on top of emergency fuel and equipment deliveries.

How we got here

Kyiv has endured near-daily drone and missile alerts for months, but officials and independent analysts say Russia moved up the timetable for its seasonal assault on energy and transport infrastructure this year, beginning in late July rather than waiting for the onset of cold weather as in previous years. The strategy, repeated with variations every autumn and winter since the war's first cold season in 2022, aims to degrade heating, electricity and water supplies faster than repair crews can restore them, increasing pressure on the government and on a population already worn down by more than four and a half years of war.

Ukraine's energy ministry has described the coming season as the hardest of the war, with more than two-thirds of the country's pre-war power-generation capacity now offline or destroyed. In January, after a wave of strikes left roughly a million people without electricity, heat or water in subzero temperatures, the European Union's civil protection mechanism airlifted 447 emergency generators to Kyiv and front-line communities from reserves held in Poland. The United Nations' humanitarian coordinator for Ukraine, Matthias Schmale, said at the time that the recurring assault on energy facilities was a violation of international humanitarian law that needed to stop; eight months later, the pattern he described has resumed. The bloc has also told the OSCE's Permanent Council that such strikes on civilian infrastructure are part of a documented pattern of international law violations.

Who is affected

The immediate disruption falls hardest on Kyiv's commuters and the roughly three million people who depend on the capital's transport grid. The Pivdennyi Bridge, a Soviet-era cable-stayed span completed in 1990, is one of only a handful of crossings linking Kyiv's left and right banks and one of two that also carry a metro line, making its closure felt well beyond the neighborhoods immediately around it. With it shut, traffic has backed up onto the Paton Bridge and other river crossings, and metro riders have had to find alternate routes across the city.

Beyond Kyiv, residents of Kramatorsk, Sumy, Kherson, Kharkiv and the Odesa region were also hit overnight, underscoring that the bombardment extends across front-line and rear-area cities alike. Families in areas that lose power or heat this winter, officials and aid groups warn, are likely to be disproportionately the elderly, the displaced and residents of buildings already damaged earlier in the war.

Reaction

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, who has publicized each strike on the bridge through his official channels, said the city was being worn down by the sustained bombardment.

"The capital is in a very dramatic situation. And it's no longer possible to pretend that we can live now as we do in peacetime. The enemy is tearing Kyiv apart."

Writing on Telegram after the latest strike, Klitschko added a narrower, practical warning for residents, noting that the bridge would remain closed to both cars and trains "after several enemy attacks," Ukraine's state news agency reported. The national air force has separately reported destroying the bulk of incoming drones most nights this autumn, even as the volume of launches has climbed, a dynamic Ukrainian officials cite both as evidence their defenses are working and as a sign Russia is not relenting.

What happens next

Kyiv city authorities have not given a timetable for reopening the bridge to road traffic or restoring the metro line across it, and repair crews are working amid the risk of further strikes on the same structure, which has now been hit on consecutive days. Ukrainian officials say they expect the broader campaign against energy and transport infrastructure to continue through the autumn and into winter, in line with the pattern of the past three years, even as the government reports progress readying heating systems and gas storage for the cold months.

International attention is likely to stay focused on whether Ukraine's power grid can withstand another wartime winter without the kind of prolonged, nationwide blackouts seen in previous years. European governments and UN agencies have signaled they expect to keep supplying generators, transformers and emergency funding as strikes continue, while Ukrainian officials continue to press allies for additional air-defense systems capable of intercepting the jet-powered drones that have become a growing share of Russia's nightly barrages.