For the third day in a row, Russian strikes are finding the bridges over the Dnipro in Kyiv. On the morning of October 3 it was the North Bridge's turn: the carriageway and the overhead lines for trolleybuses were damaged, and traffic from the left to the right bank was temporarily halted. Mayor Vitali Klitschko confirmed the hit. There is no information so far on dead or injured.

Before it, the South Bridge went down, one of the city's main arteries. It was hit several times in less than two days and is now completely closed, and restrictions have been introduced on the other crossings. In the first attack a drone exploded by the load-bearing structure just as a metro train was crossing the bridge. The passengers were not injured, but dust from the explosion got into the carriages, and the metro stopped.

Half the city on the wrong bank

Why are the bridges such a sore point? More than a third of Kyiv's residents live on the left bank, while a large share of institutions, business centres and jobs are on the right. Every closure of a few minutes creates queues. Residents told reporters they had spent up to three hours getting to work, and some people leave the buses and carry on on foot.

Moscow claims it is hitting infrastructure that the Ukrainian army also uses for logistics. Kyiv replies that the consequences are felt directly by hundreds of thousands of people who have to cross the Dnipro every day. Both claims can be true at the same time, and that is the cynicism of this kind of war: the same bridge is both a military route and the road to school.

According to Ukrainian sources, the latest attacks use new jet-powered versions of the "Geran", considerably faster than the older piston-engine drones. The exact model for each strike has not been officially confirmed. What is confirmed is the date: until October 1 Kyiv's main bridges were not systematically a direct target. Since then they are.

A fire in medicine warehouses, a plan B in the embassies

While the city struggled with traffic, a column of black smoke rose north-west of Kyiv. In Hostomel, after a Russian attack, a big fire broke out in the warehouses of "Venta LTD", a pharmaceutical distributor that supplies the Kyiv region and works with more than 450 drug suppliers, including Bayer, Pfizer, Sanofi and Teva. At least two people were injured: a 66-year-old man with burns and an abdominal injury and an eight-year-old girl wounded in the leg by shrapnel. How much medicine burned, nobody is saying for now.

At the same time, two senior Western diplomats told Britain's Guardian that fallback scenarios are being prepared behind closed doors: if Russia starts deliberately targeting foreign missions, embassies would move to Lviv or even to eastern Poland. "The situation is obviously deteriorating very quickly," one of them said. For now no Western embassy is leaving Kyiv. But when diplomats start measuring the distance to Lviv, that is a message Kyiv is certainly reading.

The Balkans know what a city without bridges looks like. Novi Sad lost its bridges over the Danube in 1999, and rebuilding took years. Kyiv still has alternative crossings for now, but every new hit narrows them. How many mornings of walking three hours to work can a city of three million people endure?