Valeriya Tkachenko was dropping her son off at school in central Kyiv when the air raid alert sounded. Staff hurried the children and parents into the shelter, where the frightened lawyer spent the next two hours with her son. A day earlier, a Russian jet-powered drone had struck a school nearby.
He feared Russia would soon target Kyiv’s other bridges, paralysing movement across a city of about 3 million people, the two halves of which are divided by the Dnipro. On Saturday morning, Russia targeted a second major bridge connecting Kyiv, damaging the road surface on the Northern Bridge and temporarily halting traffic. Kyiv is entering its most difficult period since the early days of the invasion, as intensifying Russian attacks reshape everyday life in a capital that Moscow is seeking to plunge into darkness.
For weeks, the main worry in the capital had been the coming winter, when Russia is expected once again to try to plunge Ukraine into darkness and cold. But a sharp escalation in Russian attacks has left many residents feeling that some of the hardship they had been bracing for is already here. And it’s no longer possible to pretend that we can live now as we do in peacetime,” the Kyiv mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said on Friday.
Moscow has also started its attacks on Ukraine’s energy, targeting a thermal power plant and other energy facilities, leaving several neighbourhoods without power and water by morning. Volodymyr Zelenskyy underlined the apparent shift in Russian tactics in an interview with the Financial Times this week, saying Vladimir Putin had recently ordered his commanders to abandon the rules of war. Until recently, Kyiv had retained a deceptively normal rhythm, while cities closer to the front, including Kharkiv and Dnipro, absorbed the brunt of daily missile and drone attacks.
Now, residents joke grimly that the balance is beginning to shift, with those cities at times feeling safer than the capital. The city is confronting a particularly dangerous combination of an acute shortage of Patriot interceptors for ballistic missiles and a new generation of faster, jet-powered Russian drones that are harder to shoot down. Kyiv is racing to fast-track a new generation of interceptor drones capable of taking down the jet-powered models.
Several are already in use, according to three defence industry sources, though they said it could still take weeks or months to deploy them at a scale sufficient to provide meaningful protection for the capital. At the same time, Russia’s advances on the battlefield remain relatively slow and are coming at enormous cost. Moscow captured about 361 sq km in September, according to the military analyst Konrad Muzyka, an increase on recent months but still far short of the pace needed to seize the rest of the Donbas before winter, when offensive operations typically become more difficult.
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