Russian ballistic missiles struck Kyiv's Northern Bridge over the Dnipro River overnight, closing one of the capital's main crossings in both directions, and hit energy facilities across Kyiv and its surrounding region — leaving one person dead and eight people, including a child, wounded, authorities said on Saturday. Mayor Vitali Klitschko described an "extremely difficult" situation for power, heating and water supplies in the city of more than 3 million as temperatures hovered near freezing on Saturday morning, Reuters reported.
What happened overnight?
Russian forces launched missile and drone attacks on Kyiv and the surrounding region overnight, firing multiple waves of ballistic missiles, several of them hitting the Northern Bridge, according to Klitschko. Explosions rocked the city as the waves came in. The Kyiv City Prosecutor's Office said the bridge's roadbed, trolleybus overhead line and power lines were damaged, the blast wave damaged five trucks in a parking lot near the bridge, and traffic on the bridge is blocked in both directions while experts assess the damage. The attack also damaged homes and non-residential buildings, authorities said: the prosecutor's office counted five people injured in the city's Solomyanskyi district alone, including a 14-year-old girl, as of 8:30 a.m. Governor Tymur Tkachenko said energy facilities in at least three districts of the Kyiv region had been hit, and strikes also damaged energy infrastructure in the central Zhytomyr region, the regional governor there and Russia's defence ministry said. The headline casualty figures published here — one killed and eight wounded, including a child — are the figures authorities gave Reuters for Kyiv and the surrounding region combined; the prosecutor's five injured are a city-district count from the same night, and both may be revised as the damage is assessed.
What did Russia say it targeted?
Russia's defence ministry said it carried out a massive strike on what it described as targets in Ukraine's military-industrial sector and on energy and transport infrastructure in Kyiv and the surrounding region. In Kyiv, the ministry said, strikes hit the Northern Bridge — which it said was being used to transport weapons, military equipment and vehicles for the Ukrainian armed forces — and the Meridian plant, which Russia says produces Flamingo cruise missiles. The ministry also said the strikes damaged several energy and industrial facilities in the Kyiv region, including a power plant, an electricity substation and a munitions manufacturing facility, that Russian forces struck an electricity substation in the Zhytomyr region, and that they struck a cargo vessel in the Black Sea that it said was transporting military equipment and dual-use goods to Ukraine. Those are the ministry's descriptions of its targets, published here as the ministry stated them; Ukrainian officials reported damage to homes, energy facilities and the bridge, and no independent verification of the ministry's target claims was included in the reporting opened for this article.
Why does the bridge campaign matter?
Because it is widening the winter energy campaign from power plants to the crossings that hold the capital together. Russia has stepped up air attacks on Ukraine as its ground offensive has largely stalled, pounding energy infrastructure in major cities with difficult-to-intercept missiles and drones more than four and a half years into its full-scale invasion, and in recent weeks it has expanded that campaign to target Kyiv's bridges, snarling traffic across the Dnipro, Reuters reported. Saturday's strikes land days before a new round of three-way talks in Abu Dhabi between Ukrainian and Russian officials, part of a US-backed peace push that has so far yielded few results.
This report is drawn from Reuters' November 7, 2026 reporting, opened and read on reuters.com and in full via DevDiscourse, the rostered Reuters syndication carrier, and from the Kyiv City Prosecutor's Office account of the same night, opened and read in full via Kyiv1. Casualty figures are those given by Ukrainian authorities to Reuters and by the city prosecutor's office, each attributed and scoped as such; Russia's account of its targets is the defence ministry's, published as it stated it, per the two-source rule.
