COLUMN: Kyiv crosses its Southern Bridge on foot while its interceptors keep it waiting

The morning bridge

A bridge, on foot.

An October morning.

Half an hour walking.

High above the Dnipro.

A hole behind you.

Ihor makes this trip now.

Two hours to get to work, half an hour of it on foot across the bridge, he tells The Kyiv Independent.

“We’ll have to walk like this every morning now.”

“Taking a detour would take too long,” he adds.

Every morning.

The words weigh.

He does not complain.

He states a fact.

He talks the way people talk about weather nobody chose.

No flag.

No slogan.

What Moscow aimed at

Moscow aimed at a campus.

Then intensive care.

Then a bridge.

In a city of three million people, Moscow chose what connects, what teaches, what heals.

No accident there.

This is a map.

And meanwhile, the interceptors asked of the allies keep it waiting.

Kyiv, for its part, walks.

Residents did not wait for official statements to understand what the night had taken from them.

Kyiv has no choice.

The bridge no longer waits.

The bridge says everything about this war: an army aims at what keeps a city standing.

The rest follows.

Around 9:45, the first

Monday evening, October 26.

Around 9:45 at night.

The first explosions.

Podilskyi first.

Then Obolonskyi.

Two northern districts.

An ordinary Monday.

Then not.

The first strikes land as families go to bed, and the whole night turns into a waiting room.

Explosions rock the city, Volodymyr Ivanyshyn writes in The Kyiv Independent.

Then the waiting.

The sirens.

The hallways.

The basements.

The city knows the routine.

It never gets used to it.

Every alert forces a choice between sleep and shelter, and nobody really wins that choice.

Around 3:30, the second

Around 3:30 in the morning.

The second wave.

At least seven explosions in three minutes, per The Kyiv Independent.

It hits an administrative building in Podilskyi.

A new explosion comes about fifteen minutes later, without warning.

Some fifteen minutes.

No alert sounded.

The State Emergency Service counts at least one dead and fifteen injured that night.

Ukrinform reports a 46-year-old woman dead, and fourteen injured across six districts.

The tolls vary.

The night does not.

The bridge is still standing.

Not for long.

A big hole in the road

Tuesday morning.

The Southern Bridge.

At least one ballistic missile hit it, Jimmy Rushton writes.

A big hole.

The road closed.

The rail too.

No more cars.

No more trains.

Only pedestrians now.

A road and rail bridge shut down at once means a whole flow of traffic pushed back toward the other crossings.

The bridge links the east and west of the capital, on both banks of the Dnipro.

Tens of thousands of residents cross the Northern and Southern bridges every day.

They used to.

Specialists are assessing the damage, Ukrinform reports, while the city looks for other ways across.

Damaged metro stations were repaired overnight, the mayor says.

The metro is suspended between Osokorky and Chervony Khutir, and the green line still runs from Syrets to Vydubychi.

A bridge hit on purpose

Not a first attempt.

The Southern Bridge was attacked several times in October.

Several times.

The same month.

The same target.

A target hit several times in one month stops being an accident and becomes an objective.

Nobody hits a bridge several times by mistake; you hit it because it keeps a city alive.

The bridge is work.

The hospital and the school.

The mother you visit.

Cutting it means lengthening every trip.

Moscow punches a hole in a bridge. Kyiv loses its mornings.

The trade university

Desnianskyi, on the left bank.

A campus.

Dormitories.

The ministry names the school: the State University of Trade and Economics.

Buildings, laboratories and a dormitory housing more than 200 people are damaged, according to News.az.

Two students are injured.

A young man.

A young woman.

No deaths among students or staff, The Kyiv Independent specifies.

Classes move online.

Once again.

Student beds.

Empty classrooms.

A dormitory housing more than 200 people is nothing like a barracks, and no uniform sleeps there.

The rector and his four words

Anatolii Mazaraki runs the university.

No speech.

His sentence: “We will rebuild it.”

Four words.

He could have accused, tallied the damage, begged for help, but he chose to talk about tomorrow.

No anger.

A building site.

Education Minister Butenko speaks of schools attacked once again.

Once again.

Students who were asleep, laboratories, lecture halls: that is what the missiles found in their path.

Moscow will say military target.

The dormitory says otherwise.

The rector is right.

You rebuild.

You start over.

A university that promises to rebuild the day after a strike tells Moscow its effort will be wasted.

Outside Lisova station

Near Lisova station.

An ambulance.

A paramedic injured.

A medical technician too.

They had come to help the wounded, Katherina Popilnichenko writes for United24, and were lightly hurt themselves.

Among the wounded, a student.

Twenty years old.

A dormitory.

One night.

Nine injured, mostly students from the dormitory, United24 counts, and one dead in a three-story building.

Near a supermarket.

The rescuers, hit.

Two wounded in scrubs.

An injured rescuer means one less ambulance for the next alert, and the next alert will come.

A student hurt in her dormitory has nothing to do with a base, a depot or a barracks.

When rescuers become the wounded themselves, the city loses the people who were supposed to lift it up during the night.

The intensive care windows

Dniprovskyi, two medical centers.

Windows blown out.

The windows of intensive care.

Behind that glass, beds that nobody carries down to a shelter in three minutes.

No patients or staff were hurt there, United24 notes.

A school is damaged too.

Kyoto Park as well.

A park.

A school.

Intensive care.

“The exact number of casualties is not yet known. But tragically, there are victims,” the president writes on X.

The commute that doubles

Back to the morning.

Ihor, no last name.

Just a first name.

A commute turned upside down.

His first name is enough to tell what this night did to thousands of other commuters.

Two hours.

Thirty minutes walking.

On a bridge that was hit.

He talks neither about Putin, nor strategy, nor interceptors; he talks about his legs and his schedule.

The war, seen from below.

Minutes.

Steps.

No complaint.

A plain fact.

Casualty counts list the dead and the wounded, never the hours thousands of commuters lose on a bridge.

Those hours still exist.

They add up.

Iryna does not know

Iryna, for her part, rides.

She found her own fix, two wheels and a battery, to get around a war that cuts the roads.

An electric scooter.

She weaves between pedestrians.

“I don’t know how long the journey will take,” she says.

It was her first commute this way.

She hopes the bridge is repaired soon.

She does not know.

Nobody knows.

Not city hall.

Not the army.

Not the city.

That uncertainty shows up in no casualty count, and yet it wears down an entire capital, morning after morning.

A city that no longer knows how long it takes to get to work ends up counting everything differently.

East and west

The Dnipro splits Kyiv.

It always has.

The bridges stitch it back.

They always have too.

The Southern Bridge carries the road and the rail between the two banks, and the strike shut both.

The left bank.

The right bank.

Two halves.

The bridge was the seam.

Two banks.

One river.

Three million residents.

A capital cut by its own river becomes two cities staring at each other, each one waiting for its pontoons.

Moscow aimed at it.

Left-bank residents often work on the right bank, and the other way around, ever since the city has existed.

The missile knows that.

Restricting to protect

It gets worse.

During alerts, the city now restricts movement on the bridges.

You wait.

You stop moving.

A bridge closed during every alert is a city that stops at every siren.

It is wise.

The attacker wins too.

No need to hit anything.

The threat is enough.

Fear blocks the road.

The missile that never falls on the bridge still wins, since the city stops to wait for it.

Kyiv had a seam. Moscow aimed at it.

The capital’s defense council

Kyiv reacts fast.

Vitali Klitschko promises crossings.

A decision of the capital’s Defense Council, convened after the strike.

Pontoons.

They are being prepared.

Temporary for now.

To cross the Dnipro.

No panic.

A plan.

A billion hryvnias for pontoons is the price of a strike that cost Moscow a single missile.

The announced budget is one billion hryvnias, about 22 million US dollars.

“The locations will be determined by the military command,” the mayor says.

The locations are not announced.

The council also discusses mobile shelters and “technical solutions” to protect the bridges.

An announced pontoon becomes a target, and the military command prefers to keep the surprise to itself.

The mayor under fire

Klitschko is not untouchable.

He is criticized.

For late shelters.

The Kyiv Independent says so in the same article, without hedging.

That is healthy.

A democracy at war keeps blaming its mayor for late shelters, and that is exactly what Moscow does not understand.

Here, people criticize.

And they build anyway.

Bridge hit, pontoon planned.

Dormitory holed, rector standing.

That is Kyiv.

Where the missiles come from

Where does the fire come from?

From Russia.

From Bryansk oblast.

S-400 missiles.

Iskander missiles.

Launched from Bryansk oblast, according to Jimmy Rushton’s count in The Kyiv Independent.

Along with them, 280 drones.

Sixty-nine jet-powered.

The drones also take off from Oryol, Millerovo, Kursk, Shatalovo and Primorsko-Akhtarsk, News.az lists.

An entire map.

A single command.

The fire leaves Russia.

The hole stays here.

The launchers stay out of reach, on Russian soil, while Kyiv counts its holes.

What the defense stopped

Ukrainian air defense shot down 2 ballistic missiles and 255 drones, 56 of them jet-powered.

255 out of 280.

Not bad.

Not enough.

The defense did remarkable work that night, but remarkable does not mean sufficient.

In Kyiv, 25 sites were hit directly by munitions, and 16 by debris.

Missiles get through.

It takes just one.

The Southern Bridge proves it.

An impressive interception rate comforts nobody when the missile that gets through lands on a dormitory.

The rest costs lives.

It demands interceptors.

Chernihiv, Donetsk, Kherson

Kyiv is not alone.

Over 24 hours, four dead and 55 injured across Ukraine.

Chernihiv: six injured.

A 12-year-old child.

Donetsk: three dead, 22 injured.

Kherson: four injured.

Among them, a 62-year-old nurse, hit by a Molniya drone aimed at a hospital.

A hospital, again.

On October 13 and 14, Kyiv already counted five dead and 25 injured, The Kyiv Independent recalls.

On October 22, at least one dead and 24 injured, with cluster munitions.

Three nights.

One month.

One method.

Sumy, Zaporizhzhia

Sumy: three injured.

Zaporizhzhia: five.

A 17-year-old boy.

Twelve years old.

Seventeen years old.

Sixty-two years old.

Twenty years old.

Those ages tell one thing: the Russian strike does not choose soldiers, it chooses a population.

The list is long.

It is ordinary, too.

That is what is frightening.

These figures come from the north, the east and the south, and always from the same aggressor.

A daily toll of four dead no longer makes the front page anywhere, and the Kremlin counts on exactly that.

Zelensky’s figure

One figure, now.

It comes from Zelensky.

United24 reports it.

The Middle East received 2,000 missiles in 48 hours, and Ukraine 24 in 90 days.

Read that slowly.

Two thousand against twenty-four.

The Ukrainian president said it before the Southern Bridge was holed.

Before, not after.

Time enough to check.

The math is simple.

The conclusion too.

The Middle East matters, nobody says otherwise, but a Kyiv bridge matters too.

Both wars demand stockpiles.

What Washington got right

Let us be fair.

Washington acted too.

On October 21, the United States restored ballistic warning intelligence sharing with Kyiv.

That came after a strike on a 24-story building in Sviatoshynskyi, which left two dead.

A good decision.

It saves time.

A few more minutes of warning means a dormitory gets down to the shelter.

On its own, a warning only rings.

It is not a shield.

The restored intelligence deserves a frank thank-you, and Kyiv owes it to an American decision.

A thank-you does not rule out a question, and the question fits in two numbers.

Intelligence warns, and only an interceptor truly protects the people who are asleep.

A warning alerts the city. Only an interceptor protects it.

The artificial delays

Zelensky chose a word.

The word: delays.

“Artificial” delays in providing air defense, he says.

He is aiming at his allies.

He asks them to honor defense agreements without delay.

He also asks for the means to strike Russian launchers.

Not their intentions.

Their timelines.

The word is harsh.

It is also fair.

An interceptor promised but stuck in a warehouse protects less than a siren, since at least the siren goes off.

You can thank an ally and still say its delays cost Kyiv dearly every night.

Both hold together.

A delay.

A night.

A hole.

Zelensky insults nobody, he counts, and his math should be enough to move his allies.

What Washington has to face

No blank check.

An ally is judged by its acts.

Judging an ally act by act means praising what protects and naming what delays.

The restored intelligence, yes.

The late interceptors, no.

The White House has a war in the Middle East, stockpiles to manage and priorities that are not Kyiv’s.

That is real.

It repairs no bridge.

The slow ally does not fire.

But it lets things through.

The aggressor never waits.

It fires in the evening, then fires again at 3:30 in the morning.

The bridge in the days ahead

Tomorrow, Ihor will walk.

Iryna will ride.

The metro will stop at Vydubychi.

The pontoons will come, somewhere, at a spot nobody will announce publicly.

The rector will rebuild.

Students will take their classes online, far from their laboratories.

I do not know how many mornings like this one Kyiv can absorb.

Nobody knows.

Not even Iryna.

The city has already learned to live with sirens; now it is learning to live without a bridge.

A repaired bridge will not give back the lost hours, but interceptors delivered on time can spare the next ones.

A city that walks

But Kyiv walks.

It walks on its bridges.

It walks around the holes.

It walks under the sirens.

It does not wait for its allies to move forward, but it would like them to stop making it wait.

The Southern Bridge will be repaired.

The delay, though, costs.

One step.

Then another.

The day the interceptors arrive, Ihor may not even know it, but his bridge will hold better.

Kyiv walks every morning. Its interceptors are still waiting.

Kyiv crosses its Southern Bridge on foot while its interceptors keep it waiting.

How many more mornings will people have to walk before the interceptors arrive?

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. I claim analytical clarity, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

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