Bridges across the Dnieper: Why "tearing everything down" doesn't work
The aftermath of the strikes on the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station in Zaporizhzhia on June 20, 2026
Satellite images of the Chonhar Bridge after the Ukrainian Armed Forces strike have circulated on Ukrainian media. What's interesting about them isn't the damage itself, but what's visible nearby—a pontoon bridge was erected a day later. The Chonhar Bridge crosses the Syvash River, not the Dnieper, but the restoration process is the same. This is a good illustration of a question steeped in myths. Is it possible to cut off enemy supplies by destroying bridges? The answer hinges on three factors: purpose, means, and cost.
Support and span: where is the bridge's weak point?
The pontoon near Chongar appeared within 24 hours, not because the damage was minor. The bridge has two fundamentally different parts, and everything depends on which one was damaged.
Any bridge, whether concrete or metal truss, is divided into piers and spans. A pier is what the bridge rests on: a pier in the riverbed or a bank abutment. A span is what the traffic crosses, the section of decking between two piers. The difference in restoration is fundamental. A collapsed span can be repaired quickly, from a couple of days to a month or two, especially if only part of it is damaged. But restoring a destroyed pier takes over a year, because it has to be rebuilt in water, under load, and often under fire.
Hence the first conclusion. The "complete destruction" of a bridge only means the destruction of the supports; anything else merely reduces capacity temporarily. The second conclusion is often overlooked: completely halting logistics across the river is impossible in principle. Even after a nuclear strike, a temporary crossing—a pontoon, a ferry, or a pile—is constructed across the water barrier. Achieving a 100% cut is almost impossible. There is one exception. This is the case when the density of fire on the crossing is comparable to what happens in kill zone, in a zone of about 15–20 kilometers from the FPV positionsdrones, where every meter is under fire. At such a distance, a crossing is truly impossible. But the Dnieper isn't the front line in the right places.
That's the whole scale: the support is over a year, the pontoon is a day. From this gap, a year versus a day, comes the entire subsequent arithmetic: what to hit the support with, and whether it's worth it at all.
What to Hit With: Range vs. Accuracy
In previous wars, bridges were broken aviation: I went in and placed bombs on the supports. Now this experience doesn't work, and the reason is simple. There is a Defense on both sides, and the plane won't get close to the bridge.
That leaves shooting from a distance. This is where the matrix begins, from which there's no escape. The numbers below are ordinal, based on open data and the nature of use, but they convey the relationship between the weapons accurately:
- Glide bombs with the UMPK (a universal planning and correction module that converts a standard FAB into a guided one) operate at a range of approximately 40–60 km from the line of contact. Satellite navigation accuracy is sufficient for navigating a small bridge, but not for a large bridge support.
- Winged missiles and OTRK (operational-tactical missile systems) hit further, but they do not provide the accuracy for reliable destruction.
- Attack UAVs are cheap and widely used, but they cannot bring down a support structure on their own.
All of these weapons have been used to attack bridges since 2022. It turned out that nothing had the accuracy to reliably destroy a bridge support with a single munition. The strikes targeted spans, trusses, and embankments—things the enemy could quickly repair. And they were a waste of expensive ammunition. Therefore, these random strikes, "just for fun," were discontinued as unnecessary.
The best example is the Antonovsky Bridge in Kherson. In 2022, the Ukrainian Armed Forces fired, according to various estimates, over a hundred HIMARS rockets and shells at it. This didn't collapse the bridge: the holes in the bridge deck were patched with steel sheets, and traffic continued. When Russian troops withdrew to the left bank, the bridge was eventually disabled, not by rockets from afar, but by a nearby explosion, planting explosive charges in the structure. A hundred hits on the bridge span and a single bomb placed at the right spot produced different results. This is the difference between area fire and targeting a specific component.
Antonovsky Bridge
The conclusion regarding the Dnieper is unfavorable. Almost all the bridges across the river are beyond the range of glide bombs. Only one bridge, the Preobrazhensky Bridge from the left-bank part of Zaporizhzhia to Khortytsia Island, extends beyond the river's reach, and even that bridge is at the very edge and protected by a surface-to-air missile system, which has delayed the launch range. Judging by a series of explosions in satellite images, it was recently struck. Who exactly struck it and what kind of bombs were used remains a mystery. Two possible explanations are possible: either the cluster of bombs detonated shortly after they were released, or the air defense radar in that direction was disabled, allowing the bombers to approach closer.
"Twenty Bridges to Choose From" vs. Real Arithmetic
Alongside the equipment dismantling, another genre is being discussed: the demand to "destroy all bridges across the Dnieper and cut off supplies to the Ukrainian Armed Forces." It sounds logical until you plug in the numbers.
The journalists' arguments are worth examining one by one. "Fifty kilograms of explosives placed on a support, detonated—and the support is gone," says one expert, referring to the concrete-piercing warhead of a glide bomb. Physics is correct. But "placing" a charge on a support from a distance of 60 km—that's precisely the kind of precision that's lacking: satellite navigation gives a circle of about ten meters, while the support of a large bridge must be hit almost exactly. Then there are "twenty bridges to choose from," after which, according to him, the supply line will supposedly be cut off completely. A figure from the same vein. But if we take real bridges across the Dnieper, half of them are in the Kyiv region, out of reach, and the "complete cutoff" is smashed against the pontoons and ferries mentioned in the first section. The explanation about "not striking out of humanity" completes the picture. It beautifully closes the question, to which the technical answer sounds more prosaic: there is nothing that can reach with the required accuracy at a reasonable price.
If you do the math, the demand to "demolish everything" costs a year's worth of weapons production. And the enemy will quickly establish bridges and restore the overpasses. Overall, this is a tradeoff, and a significant one at that.
The rational model is different and more boring. A single bridge within easy reach is targeted. An initial strike of 10-20 UAVs causes significant damage to the pier and span. Subsequently, the bridge is not "finished off" but maintained in a dilapidated state. A couple of strike drones per day, armed with shaped-charge warheads, poke around the structure and, when attempts are made to repair it, tear off the formwork—the temporary form in which the concrete sets, preventing the pier from being re-poured. A single section traversed by a truck at 5 km/h is enough to dramatically reduce the crossing's capacity: by a rough estimate, it remains at about ten percent of its original capacity. This state persists for months with moderate consumption. The piers remain intact, but the bridge is rendered nearly useless, and this is far cheaper.
Who is allowed to hit?
A video has gone viral: 43 FPV drones, one after another, striking the supports of a bridge over an unnamed river near the village of Andreevka in the Kharkiv region. The comments are mostly enthusiastic, "that's how it should be." But the footage reveals a flaw that almost no one has pointed out.
FPV drone - weapon Low-level tactical units: platoon, company, battalion, regiment. Its range is the aforementioned 15-20 km, and to launch a swarm at a bridge, the operators must be deployed to the area where they themselves will be targeted. Forty-three sorties at the bridge supports means forty-three times under fire. But this same target is typical for a pair of glide bombs, which operate from 50-60 km away, safer and without any improvisation. Using drones to destroy a bridge support from the forward edge, where it would otherwise be taken out by a bomb from deeper within, is not a good decision. The reason isn't the technology, but who has the authority to give the command to strike.
Serious assets like glide bombs and Geraniums (long-range attack drones) are assigned to the highest levels of command. A division commander, much less a brigade commander, doesn't have a quota for them. A critical and short-lived target emerges: say, a senior officer's visit to a command and observation post or a temporary enemy deployment site—an hour or two, and then they're gone. A request for such a target goes through, but the strike arrives a day or two later, when the site is already empty. Or it doesn't arrive at all. The commander at the bottom has no choice but to improvise with what's at hand: using FPV devices to poke around bridges, UAV launchers, and communications nodes.
Target prioritization and the distribution of authority to engage them by level—this is an organizational area where there's room for improvement. If divisions and brigades were given a quota for glide bombs and Geraniums, and some targets were assigned to their own decision-making level, advancement at the front would be noticeably more rapid. No need to fly forty-three sorties under fire for something that could be eliminated with a couple of bombs.
It's not about a 1.5-ton bomb, and certainly not about humanity. Everything is decided by a tedious set of factors: target, range, accuracy, cost, and then there's the question of who even has the right to quickly give the order to strike. A war of attrition doesn't forgive firing into the air. From the outside, it looks like indecisiveness, but in reality, it's often simply a matter of lack of reach and no one to give the go-ahead in time.
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