For three months, residents of Kulykiv fell asleep to an unusual silence — where trucks used to rumble around the clock, traffic simply stopped. The detour through Zhovkva became second nature even to those who had never before noticed this town on the map. Then, on the evening of July 27, the silence broke with the sound of engines: the bridge in Kulykiv on the M-09 highway finally reopened to traffic — right on the day it had been promised back in spring.
For a casual passer-by, it’s just another repaired bridge. But for the thousands of drivers who travel daily from Ternopil through Lviv to the Polish border, and for exporters counting every hour of delay at the crossing, it is a concrete change measured in kilometers and minutes. The M-09 is not just a regional road but part of the route to the Rava-Ruska–Hrebenne border crossing, one of Ukraine’s key logistical windows into the European Union.
The Bridge in Kulykiv: What Exactly Was Done
- The crossing is located at km 141+459 of the M-09 Ternopil–Lviv–Rava-Ruska international highway, in the town of Kulykiv, Lviv district, Lviv region.
- Traffic was closed on April 27, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. — for exactly three months of capital repairs.
- The bridge reopened on the evening of July 27, 2026, meeting the announced deadline to the day.
- The work is overseen by the Infrastructure Restoration and Development Service in Lviv region, headed by Oleh Bereza, with project support from the Restoration Agency’s project management group.
- For now, cars, buses and pedestrians use the bridge; trucks continue on detour routes while pavement replacement continues on the adjacent section toward Rava-Ruska.
Why This Road Matters Beyond Kulykiv
The bridge repair is just one episode in a larger capital repair of the M-09 Lviv–Rava-Ruska section (km 129+807 to 157+410), which the Infrastructure Restoration and Development Service in Lviv region is carrying out as part of a broader reconstruction of the entire highway. According to regional media, the full repair of the more than 60-kilometer road leading to the border crossing with Poland is financed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the cost of the work exceeds EUR 100 million, and the project is expected to run through 2027. For Lviv region, which has become one of the country’s main transit hubs since 2022, every kilometer of this highway is about the speed at which goods and people reach the border.
What Comes Next
For Kulykiv itself, the main thing has already happened: traffic has been restored, and the promised deadline was not moved by a single day. Next, contractors will focus on the pavement of the section toward Rava-Ruska, so that by the time the whole project is finished the route from Lviv to the Polish border becomes continuous, without bottlenecks like this bridge. For drivers who spent three months detouring Kulykiv through Zhovkva, the usual route is once again the shortest one — without the extra kilometers and minutes lost in a queue on the bypass.
One repaired bridge in a town of a few thousand people will not change the country’s overall reconstruction statistics. But it is exactly this kind of deadline kept and crossing built right on schedule that builds trust that the country’s large-scale reconstruction is not just numbers in reports, but real roads people can actually drive on.
Source: Halinfo
