A drone hits Kyiv's Northern Bridge again as Merz stands in the capital

A Russian drone struck Kyiv's Pivnichnyi, or Northern, Bridge on Sunday morning for the second day running, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. Two people were injured. Traffic from the left bank to the right bank was blocked after Saturday's hit, which damaged the road surface and trolleybus wires. The Pivdennyi, or Southern, Bridge was struck several times earlier in the week. Before Thursday neither of the two Dnipro crossings used by ordinary traffic in the capital had been hit in the full-scale war.

The BBC said it had verified video of Sunday's strike: cars still moving as the drone hit the deck and a fireball rose, then a hole in a traffic lane. Klitschko also reported a separate drone hit on a heating main, with a temporary loss of hot water in the north-eastern Desnyanskyi district. City officials have talked about pontoon bridges, ferries and even a tunnel to keep the two banks linked if the permanent crossings stay damaged. Repair crews were already on the Northern Bridge after Saturday, fixing trolleybus lines when the next drone arrived.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was in Kyiv for an unannounced visit as the Sunday strike happened. He went to the National Academy of Sciences, hit in an earlier drone attack, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Merz said an academy strike a few hundred metres from the German embassy, and an air-raid alarm on a Sunday morning, were daily war crimes. Air-raid sirens sounded more than once during the visit. Economy Minister Katherina Reiche and ten business leaders from defence and energy firms were with him. RFE/RL reported that the package he was expected to announce would include interceptors able to hit Russian jet-powered drones. Russia had warned foreign nationals, including diplomats, the day before that they faced mortal danger in Ukraine, and said the bridges were being used to move troops and cargo.

The two bridges are not military objects in the way a depot is. They carry commuters between the western city and the eastern districts across the Dnipro. Weekday volumes are large. A hole in one lane does not drop the span. It does force traffic onto the other crossing, which has already been hit, and onto whatever pontoon or ferry the city can put in the water. Klitschko's line that the enemy is tearing the city apart is a political sentence. The engineering fact under it is that Kyiv has two principal road bridges over the river in daily use, and both have been struck inside four days.

Moscow's claim that the bridges move troops is the justification it is offering. Kyiv's answer is the commuter traffic and the heating main in Desnyanskyi. Both can be true of a city at war: a bridge can carry civilians at 9 a.m. and military stores at night. The drone on Sunday hit while cars were on the deck, which is what the verified video shows. That is a different act from a strike on an empty span at 3 a.m.

Merz's presence fixes a date. The visit was not cancelled after Saturday's bridge strike or after the Russian warning to diplomats. The academy stop put him a few hundred metres from his own embassy and inside a building already damaged. What he signs, and whether the interceptors are in the package or only reported as likely, will be the part of Sunday that outlasts the traffic jam. The open question for the city is how many more hits the Northern and Southern decks can take before the pontoon plan stops being a contingency and becomes the commute.