Russia warns foreigners; Prague stays in Kyiv

Russia's Foreign Ministry on 3 October warned foreign nationals, including diplomatic staff, against staying in Ukraine or travelling there, and promised to continue "massive retaliatory strikes" on Kyiv and other cities (TASS, Reuters). The warning came in a week when Russian drones hit two of the bridges that link Kyiv's two banks (Kyiv Independent, CityNews/AP). Moscow can issue warnings. The governments with staff in Kyiv decide whether those people stay.

What Moscow actually said

Some headlines presented the statement as Russia telling diplomats to leave Kyiv (Polskie Radio). The new warning covered all of Ukraine. Kyiv appeared in a passage recalling that Moscow had earlier urged foreigners and diplomats to leave the city (Reuters).

The ministry framed the message as a repeat. It cited its own statement of 25 May and a briefing two days later by Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin (TASS). So Saturday's text restated an existing position and did not launch a new policy.

No named official signed the statement, which the ministry posted on its website. It says Russia is hitting "military facilities" in response to Ukrainian attacks on Russian civilians (Interfax). It names no date, weapon or target. The reports cited here do not verify that the targets were military.

We could not retrieve the original ministry page. The exact time the statement went up is therefore unknown, and so is its timing relative to Saturday's strike.

The bridges under attack

The attacks were already changing daily life in Kyiv. Russian drones hit the Southern Bridge repeatedly from 1 October. The bridge carries six road lanes and the green metro line across the Dnipro (Yle).

The bridge's closure pushed buses and cars onto the city's other crossings. Mayor Vitali Klitschko called the situation severe, as our earlier report described (To Brief).

On Saturday morning a second crossing, the Northern Bridge, was hit. The strike damaged its road surface and trolleybus lines (CityNews/AP). Hitting the crossings between Kyiv's two halves strains a city of commuters, whatever Moscow says it is aiming at.

The decision sits with each government

Moscow has no power to order a foreign embassy out of Ukraine. Every government that sends diplomats decides whether its staff stay, move or scale back. For a European capital, the question is how much danger the strikes pose to its people. Russia's view of where they belong does not settle that.

The Czech government has answered on the record. Foreign Ministry spokesman Adam Čörgő said embassy staff were remaining in Kyiv and called such Russian warnings nothing new. He added that any further steps would follow the ministry's internal crisis procedures (Novinky).

Kyiv's side of the picture came a day before the warning. Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi said then that no foreign mission had told Ukraine it planned to relocate (ZN.ua). His statement predates Moscow's text, so it cannot show how missions reacted to it.

We also checked Romanian, French and Hungarian sources and found no new public decision from those governments. The EU's own delegation in Kyiv has announced nothing either. Silence does not prove nothing has changed inside those missions. It means none of these governments has said so publicly.

The warning repeated a position Moscow first stated in May. It closed no embassy and changed no rule about who decides. What changed this week was physical: drones damaged the bridges that hold Kyiv together, and the city had to reroute around them. Against that backdrop, the only European government response documented so far comes from Prague, which is keeping its diplomats where they are.