Kyiv has two big bridges over the Dnipro, and neither had been touched before Thursday. By Saturday morning both had been hit, the second one, the Northern Bridge, this morning. Klitschko says “the enemy is tearing Kyiv apart,” which is accurate in the most literal geographic sense: road, rail and trolleybus links between the two halves of the city are cut.

Russia’s explanation is that the bridges move troops and military cargo. Maybe. But the same statement again urged foreign citizens, diplomats included, to leave the city. Bridges are a strange thing to hit if you’re after a front line, since the front is nowhere near them. They’re very good at making a city of three million feel like it’s been sliced, and at making anyone with an embassy there reconsider the lease.

Put that next to the rest of the week. Wednesday’s largest energy strike since spring, then the school in Kyiv, the Kaliningrad nuclear talk, the arson in Estonia. Denmark has been saying Russia could test a NATO country within months. A request that diplomats go home reads differently when it arrives alongside all that, and I can’t tell whether it’s a warning or a rehearsal for something else.

Meanwhile Washington is reportedly trying to restart ceasefire talks, and Witkoff and Kushner left Kyiv last month just before the strikes began. Diplomacy in this war keeps arriving on the same schedule as the drones. Whoever’s setting that rhythm doesn’t seem worried that we’ll notice.

The G7 oil release, by the way, is the quieter story here: a coordinated draw-down to head off a diesel export ban. When the allies are pooling emergency stocks to keep one of their own from closing its taps, that’s not a footnote.

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