Kyiv: ballistic missiles and drones overnight – damage to the Northern Bridge, power supply “extremely difficult”

Russian ballistic missiles and long-range drones struck Kyiv and its wider region overnight from Friday, November 6 into Saturday, November 7. At 07:09 Kyiv time, Mayor Vitali Klitschko put the toll in the capital at five injured, among them a 14-year-old child. Two of them are in hospital.

The strike came hours after a public warning from Volodymyr Zelensky. On Friday evening the Ukrainian president wrote that Kyiv had information about a new attack targeting the energy sector, the Dnipro bridges and civilian infrastructure. In the same post he pressed partners for interceptor missiles for the Patriot systems: “Every agreement matters, and in deliveries every day counts.”

The damage in the capital

Shortly after one in the morning Mr Klitschko reported explosions on the outskirts and ballistic strikes on infrastructure. The first damage was recorded in the Solomianskyi district, where fragments fell on a five-storey apartment block. The city’s Military Administration later added a fire in a non-residential building and damage to a kindergarten building.

The State Emergency Service recorded the worst damage in Solomianskyi: serious destruction of a two-storey structure within the kindergarten grounds and the collapse of part of the facade on the ground floor of an apartment block, with no casualties at that spot. Elsewhere a truck and a building were engulfed in flames, while in three five-storey blocks the blast wave broke windows. In the Kyiv region, in the village of Bohdanivka in the Brovary district, a drone hit a single-family house. An elderly couple were trapped under the rubble: the woman got out on her own and rescuers freed the man, born in 1951. Both were injured.

The most visible hit concerns the Northern Bridge over the Dnipro. Mr Klitschko announced that it was damaged and closed in both directions. Crews were there from early morning. The roadway, the trolleybus overhead line and a power line were damaged, while the blast wave damaged five trucks in an adjacent car park.

Energy and heating

The energy side is also serious. The mayor spoke of damage to energy facilities in the Kyiv and Zhytomyr regions and of an “extremely difficult” power supply situation in the capital, affecting heating and water supply. Metro trains were restored on all lines, with a warning of possible temporary interruptions or less frequent service because of voltage fluctuations. Ukrenergo had already scheduled hourly power outages for Saturday for all categories of consumers in some regions, as a consequence of the massive Russian attacks on the grid. By Saturday midday Mr Klitschko reported that the capital’s water supply was working normally and that heating had been restored in 60% of apartment blocks.

The attack continued after sunrise. The Ukrainian Air Force was tracking jet drones heading for the Kyiv region and the city itself, while the capital’s administration reported a fire in a non-residential area in the Sviatoshynskyi district after a drone fell, as well as a fire in a house in the Darnytskyi district where fragments fell.

In Moscow, the Russian defence ministry claimed that a “massive strike” with precision weapons from land and long-range drones hit defence-industry, energy and transport facilities in Kyiv and its region, which, according to the Russian side, serve the Ukrainian armed forces. Ukrainian intelligence estimates that Russia has up to 700 ballistic missiles, as we reported in the HUR assessment on Russian missile production.