"We were sleeping when, at 6:15 in the morning, the alarm went off. But at 6:18 everything exploded," recalls Tetiana Semyhailo, 52, while showing the bed she shared with her husband, who was injured by cuts to his legs after bursting the windows. Both escaped in the middle of the black smoke that took over their apartment, on the fifth floor. A Russian drone had just crashed next to their block, in the Solomianskyi district (kyiv). It happened in the early hours of last Saturday, but the woman is still nervous. "We live 24 hours waiting for the alerts. That's why I remember the time perfectly," he concludes.
Indeed, for weeks now, the alarms warning of attacks no longer go off only at night, but also throughout the day. The macabre routine is now part of the daily lives of the approximately three million inhabitants of the capital of Ukraine. They are suffering the largest offensive since, in February 2022, Kremlin troops tried for four weeks to take over this city, without achieving their goal. Now, among numerous other objectives, the Kremlin is trying to sow chaos by systematically attacking the bridges that connect the two banks of kyiv over the Dnieper River in recent days. Four in total, since Thursday.
The hardest hit is the Pivdennyi, known as the Southern Pass, an essential pass that has been reached up to four times between Thursday and Friday. The last impact came when local authorities had already made the decision to cut it despite its critical importance for the capital. Two other bridges were also bombed and partially closed. In the midst of the communications chaos, a fourth bridge, the Pivnichnyi or North bridge, was also attacked with a drone on Saturday morning in what is seen as a new Russian strategy to block the country's main city.
Car and bus traffic, subway traffic and train traffic have been shaken. And traffic jams keep a significant part of the city blocked. The images of the projectiles hitting bridges spread by the media and social networks represent another blow added to the already wounded spirit of a population fed up with the years of war.
The mayor, Vitaliy Klitschko, does not hide that the offensive is “destroying” kyiv, where the situation is “dramatic,” as he acknowledged on Friday after the defense council meeting. The president, Volodímir Zelenski, spoke with EL PAÍS on Thursday in a recently bombed school. He said Putin wants to push neighbors out of kyiv, but “our country is more than the capital and the capital is still strong.”
The offensive against kyiv is the response of Russian President Vladimir Putin to the systematic counterattacks that Ukraine has deployed in different regions of the neighboring country, especially against refineries, and that have short-circuited the internal fuel market, with a growing shortage.
The hits against the bridges are joined by many others, mostly against civilian targets, as Zelensky highlighted while accusing Moscow of bombing targets far from the front. Only in the capital and its metropolitan area have places such as schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, single-family homes, official institutions, gas stations, data centers that allow internet connection, shops, energy and railway infrastructures, warehouses, media headquarters and offices, among others, been affected.
“The enemy has changed its bombing tactics on kyiv,” says Sergiy Novenko, head of the State Administration of the Solomianskyi district, one of the hardest hit in the city. "The attacks practically continue throughout the day, and there are almost non-stop air alerts. In addition, jet-powered Shahed [drones] are launched."
The consequence of these attacks is that the normal functioning of the city is prevented. “There are attempts to leave the city without electricity, to stop the bridges, to destroy the thermal power plants that we are currently restoring [after previous attacks],” Novenko maintains. "What does all this boil down to? The enemy seeks to cause panic among the population."
With 168 attacks, September has been by far the bloodiest month in kyiv so far this year, according to young French analyst Clément Molin. Growth has skyrocketed especially since May, but the sum of July, August and September, 392, exceeds the 386 of the first six months of the year. The 21 attacks in March are a mirage compared to the current situation.
Some have not endured it and have left their parents, their friends and their home behind. A lifetime, as Nadia Andrianova, 48, explains over the phone. This employee of a communication agency already fled with her little girl, in March 2022, for a year. Then, Russian troops reached the gates of kyiv without causing it to fall. Now, Andrianova has settled with her eight-year-old daughter in Uzhgorod, more than 800 kilometers from her home and a stone's throw from Slovakia.
“The nights in kyiv became very dangerous” and “we started going to the metro station to spend the night there once or twice a week,” he says. Around May, ballistic missiles began to arrive, against which Ukraine has barely any defenses. “They hit very quickly, so you don't have time to go to the shelter, or to the underground parking, you don't even have time to go to the hallway, if that's any use...,” argues Andrianova.
In the kyiv region, as in the rest of the country, a special resilience plan has been designed to deal with attacks during the winter. However, the current level of pressure on the inhabitants is such that the hell that Russia usually turns the winter months into is less of a topic of conversation on the street this year.
“Despite everything, the situation here is not as difficult as in the territories near the front,” Novenko highlights. In any case, remember that in Solomianskyi a third of the buildings have been hit, as well as half of the educational centers: about 40. One of them is the one visited on Thursday by Zelensky after the impact of one of those feared jet drones.
The experience of the years of war and the improvement of warning systems lead the inhabitants to make quick decisions. Tetiana Semyhailo, the neighbor on the fifth floor, explains it: "When they warn that missiles are coming, we run to the bunker. But this time it was a drone and we stayed in bed." On the first floor of their building, much closer to the explosion than their own, lives a couple with their young son. In the middle of the chaos, no one responded inside. They thought they might be injured or even dead, so the neighbors tried to break down the door without success. Minutes later they located that family by phone. They confirmed that they were outside.
Roman Samchuk, 43, and his wife Victoria, 41, consider her decision to go to spend the weekend at her mother's house in the middle of the alarms as premonitory. He laughs and shows that armored gate five days later. “A good Spanish door,” he emphasizes, trying to make the reporter feel proud. Once inside the house, he approaches every detail, every drawer, every photo, every shoe... everything covered by a film of carbon.
Samchuk admits he's not ready to give up much of his belongings just yet. They also do not know when they will be able to live in their house again and take care of the showy marigolds that they planted at the foot of the street and that the Russian Geran-type drone, whose remains still lie nearby, left battered. Little Severin, two years old, runs next to the trees destroyed by the blast wave.
What this family is clear about is that, unlike Nadia Andrianova, they will not leave kyiv. They are confident that the police investigation will confirm that there has been no structural damage to the block. Meanwhile, they are welcomed by friends. “We love living here,” sighs Roman, who remembers how he met his wife in the middle of the Russian invasion and they ended up getting married on January 18, 2024, five months before Severin came into the world in a Ukraine at war.
