The Antonivs'kyi Bridge functions as a motif in Endling, recurring across Pasha’s arc to register the shifting meaning of connection in a country whose identity is violently contested. A box girder structure spanning the Dnipro, the river that, as Pasha explains in his interview, “cleaves Ukraine in half” (336), the bridge initially represents the possibility of homecoming. When Pasha first encounters it in Kherson, its “austere Sovietness” tugs at him with a nostalgia he “hadn't realized he possessed” (216), pulling him toward an unadorned past that feels more authentically his than the anglicized life he left behind. In this moment, the bridge seems to promise what Pasha has been seeking throughout the novel: a physical threshold between his displaced self and the homeland he is trying to reclaim.

That promise is annihilated when Pasha discovers the carnage on its surface. The bridge becomes a site of trauma so severe he can process it only through denial, insisting to himself that the bodies were “piles of muddy, crumpled clothes” (221). Yet rather than abandoning the image, Pasha paints the bridge obsessively after settling in Kherson, rendering it repeatedly as it “must have looked before all that happened, when it was just a bridge” (336). His compulsive return to the structure reveals how national identity in the novel is constructed not from stable inheritance but from acts of imaginative restoration. When the interviewer reads the paintings as symbolizing reconciliation between Ukrainians and Russians, Pasha erupts in frustration, exposing how outsiders project false unity onto a structure whose real significance lies in its destruction: first by Ukrainians cutting Russian supply lines, then by Russians preventing Ukrainian advance. The bridge cannot symbolize peace precisely because it has become the contested ground on which identity is both claimed and erased.