Intensified Russian strikes are tearing Kyiv apart, warns mayor — SkimNews
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- Vitaliy Klitschko warned Russian drone and missile strikes are "tearing Kyiv apart," describing a "very dramatic situation" after a crisis meeting of Kyiv's defence council, with Moscow battering critical infrastructure, logistics, and housing.
- Kyiv's Pivdennyi (Southern) bridge was struck in an overnight drone attack and hit again Friday evening — the fourth time in two days — forcing suspension of all metro and automobile traffic, with restrictions placed on the city's two other key bridges.
- Kyiv's data centres were recently hit, causing internet outages, and one person was killed when a multi-storey residential building was struck overnight, according to Ukraine's DSNS state emergencies service.
- President Zelensky said Putin decided in early September that "there are no rules now," telling the Financial Times that Russia wants to "destroy our bridges, our data centres, the internet, mobile networks, hospitals, kindergartens, schools" to force people to flee.
- Putin justified the attacks as a direct response to Ukraine's strikes on Russian oil refineries and ships in the Black Sea, while admitting Kyiv "got some results" and that Russia had lost about 1% of its GDP — a figure Kyiv cites as proof its refinery campaign is hurting the Kremlin's war finances.
- Russia has targeted Ukrainian energy infrastructure and ramped up attacks every winter since launching the full-scale invasion in 2022; Kyiv's population is estimated at about three million, many of whom rely on the city's metro network.
Why it matters: Putin's own admission that Ukraine's refinery strikes cost Russia roughly 1% of GDP exposes the real economic price behind his retaliation narrative, even as he frames the escalation as defensive. For Kyiv's three million residents, the repeated targeting of a single bridge that carries metro and car traffic across the Dnipro goes beyond infrastructure damage — it threatens to paralyze daily movement in a city whose population is heavily dependent on the metro.
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