Ukrainians Blew This Bridge to Save Kyiv

The Romanivsky Bridge crosses the Irpin River at the village of Romanivka, twenty kilometers northwest of central Kyiv. In peacetime it carried the Warsaw Highway. On February 25, 2022, the second morning of the Russian offensive, Ukrainian engineers wired the deck with explosives and brought it down into the river. Russian armor advancing from Hostomel through Bucha now faced fifteen meters of open water and a wetland whose spring thaw the sappers had helped along by opening dam gates upstream. The road to Kyiv was closed. The demolition was ordered by the Kyiv defense council in the small hours of the invasion. It was one of a series of bridge cuts on the Irpin and Kozarovychi rivers, the natural moat guarding Kyiv from the northwest, and it worked. The Russian mechanized columns halted at the water. What had been a straight forty-minute drive to the government quarter became a slow flanking movement through minefields and Ukrainian ambushes that stalled for weeks and then reversed. The cut also trapped civilians. Bucha, Irpin, and Hostomel were now cut off from Kyiv with a Russian army behind them. Over the next three weeks perhaps 40,000 people evacuated west across the broken span, walking along the twisted girders and the concrete piers that still stood in the river, escorted through mortar fire by Ukrainian territorial defense units. Photographers from AP, AFP, Reuters, and the New York Times filed images from the crossing that within a week were on the front page of every serious newspaper in the world: an elderly couple lifted across the twisted deck, a woman carrying a small dog inside her coat, a child asleep on a suitcase at the bottom of the ravine. Ukrainian forces retook Romanivka in the general Russian withdrawal from the Kyiv oblast at the end of March 2022. A new bridge was built beside the ruin and opened in November 2023. The old bridge was left where it fell. The site is now the Romanivsky Bridge Memorial, designed by the Ukrainian studio Balbek Bureau, with the twisted span preserved and a walkway of glass laid over the escape route the civilians used. What was ordered as a demolition became the way home for tens of thousands.