On Saturday, an explosion partially brought down a bridge that connects the Crimean Peninsula with Russia, destroying a vital supply route for the Kremlin’s sputtering military campaign in southern Ukraine. Russian authorities said that the bomb claimed the lives of three persons.
Although Moscow did not assign responsibility, the speaker of Crimea’s regional parliament, supported by the Kremlin, instantly condemned Ukraine. While others applauded the attack and Ukrainian officials repeatedly threatened to destroy the bridge, Kyiv refrained from taking credit. Putin was dealt a humiliating blow by the bombing, which occurred the day after he turned 70 and may have caused him to escalate his campaign against Ukraine.
According to Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee, a truck bomb set seven fuel-carrying railroad carriages on fire, which led to the “partial collapse of two parts of the bridge.” According to Russia’s Investigative Committee, the explosion killed a man and a woman traveling across the bridge in a car, and their remains were found. It gave no information on the third victim.
The longest European bridge spanning 19 kilometers (12 miles) of Kerch Strait between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov opened for traffic in 2018. The $3.6 billion undertaking is a concrete representation of Moscow’s rights to the Crimean Peninsula and has established a vital connection to the peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
The peninsula is significant to Russia’s military activities in the south of Ukraine and has symbolic significance for it. Transporting goods to Crimea would be considerably more difficult if the bridge were rendered unusable. Ukraine is waging a counteroffensive to retake the territories that Russia annexed north of Crimea early in the invasion and established a land corridor along the Sea of Azov.
The bridge features parts for both trains and cars. According to Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee, one of the two links of the automotive bridge collapsed due to the explosion and fire, while the other link remained standing.
Crimea has adequate gasoline, according to Russia’s Energy Ministry, which also noted that it looked into methods to restock the supply. Until further notice, authorities have halted cross-bridge passenger train service. After learning of the explosion, Putin commanded the formation of a government committee to handle the crisis.
The speaker of Crimea’s regional parliament attributed the explosion to Ukraine, supported by the Kremlin, which also minimized the damage and promised that the bridge would be quickly rebuilt.
Vladimir Konstantinov, the head of the State Council of the Republic, posted on Telegram, “Now they have something to be proud of over 23 years of their management, they didn’t manage to build anything worthy of attention in Crimea, but they have managed to damage the surface of the Russian bridge.”
On Saturday, the legislative leader of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s party refrained from directly attributing blame to Kyiv, instead appearing to frame it as a result of Moscow’s annexation of the Crimea and efforts to unite the peninsula with the Russian mainland.
“Illegal building in Russia is beginning to collapse and catch fire. The explanation is straightforward: if you create something explosive, it will blow sooner or later, according to David Arakhamia, the Servant of the People party’s chairman, in a Telegram post.
And this is only the start. Russia isn’t known for trustworthy building, of all things,” he added. Other Ukrainian officials were more jubilant, although they refrained from taking the blame.
The Ukrainian postal office said in a statement that it would publish stamps honoring the explosion, citing the use of vintage movie posters in the artwork to emphasize the bridge’s “sacred value” to Moscow. The postal office previously produced a set of stamps commemorating the loss of the Russian flagship cruiser Moskva by a Ukrainian attack in late May.
Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, shared a video on Twitter that showed the Kerch Bridge on fire on the left and Marilyn Monroe singing her well-known “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” on the right.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a Zelenskyy adviser, tweeted: “Crimea, the bridge, the beginning. Everything unlawful must be destroyed, everything taken must be given back to Ukraine, and everything Russia has captured must be ejected.
According to Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry in Moscow, “the Kyiv regime’s reaction to the destruction of civilian infrastructure demonstrates its terrorist nature.” Russia’s vulnerability was highlighted in August by a string of explosions at an airfield and an armament stockpile in Crimea.
Local authorities in Crimea gave conflicting accounts of what the damaged bridge would imply for locals and their ability to purchase consumer goods on the peninsula, which is home to Sevastopol, a significant city and a naval base. The peninsula is a popular year-round sun-and-sea destination for Russian tourists.
To prevent a panicked run on supplies, Mikhail Razvozhayev, the head of Sevastopol, initially announced a ban on the sales of car fuel in canisters and said that the sales of groceries would be limited to 3 kilograms per person. However, he quickly reversed course and said there would be no restrictions an hour later.
He also tried to reassure the locals by reassuring them that they were still connected to the mainland. He said the ferry crossing at the Crimean Bridge had begun operations, and there were land passages across the new areas. According to the Association of Russian Travel Agencies, roughly 50,000 visitors were vacationing in Crimea at the time of the explosion. Ilya Umansky, the president of Russia’s leading tourist organization, told the Interfax news agency that boat services between the peninsula and the mainland had resumed on Saturday. Still, he also acknowledged that anybody attempting to visit Crimea in the coming days would likely encounter “some inconvenience.”
The explosion on the bridge happened hours after explosives early on Saturday morning in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, which sent towering plumes of smoke into the sky and set off a string of subsequent explosions.
According to Ukrainian officials, Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city, was allegedly bombarded by Russian surface-to-air missiles, who also claimed at least one person was hurt. Oleh Sinehubov, the regional governor, said on Telegram that Saltivka and Osnovianskiy, primarily residential districts, were the targets of the attacks.
According to Sinehubov, Russia used S-300 missiles in the attack. If accurate, this would be the most recent incident in which Moscow was said to have used a weapon intended for air defense to hit ground targets, potentially due to a lack of better ammunition.
Five towns and villages were targeted overnight, according to reports from Ukrainian officials in the northern Sumy area, west of Kharkiv, and a frequent target of Russian shelling and missile assaults. The regional governor, Dmytro Zhyvytskyi, reported the death of a 51-year-old citizen on Telegram.
Additionally, three communities near the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, Zaporizhzhia, were hit by Russian missiles. According to Valentyn Reznichenko, the regional governor, no one was hurt during the attacks on Margarets, Chervonohryhorivka, and Myrove.
Meanwhile, according to Ukrainian rescue services, the number of fatalities from earlier missile attacks on residential complexes in Zaporizhzhia increased to 17. Twenty-one people had been rescued from the wreckage of a four-story apartment building, according to a Telegram post from the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, and search and rescue operations were still ongoing.
On Thursday, more least 40 residential buildings in the Ukrainian-controlled city—which serves as the capital of the territory Moscow sought to acquire last week illegitimately—were destroyed by Russian missiles. The name-brand nuclear power station, one of the biggest in the world, is located across a sizable reservoir on the Dnieper river from the town of Zaporizhzhia.
The devastating attacks came hours after the president of Ukraine declared that his country’s forces had retaken three more villages in one of the four districts Russia claimed as its own, marking Moscow’s most recent battlefield turnabout.
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