KYIV, Ukraine — A fireball consumed two sections of the only bridge connecting the occupied Crimean peninsula with Russia on Saturday, disrupting the most important supply line for Russian troops fighting in southern Ukraine and carrying a embarrassing blow to the Kremlin, which faces continued losses. on the battlefield and growing criticism at home.
The explosion and fire knocked part of the 12-mile-long Kerch Strait Bridge into the sea and killed at least three people, according to Russian authorities. A senior Ukrainian official has corroborated Russian reports that Ukraine was behind the attack. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity due to a government ban on discussing the blast, added that Ukrainian intelligence services orchestrated the blast, using a bomb loaded on a truck crossing the bridge .
For Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, who presided over the opening of the bridge in 2018, the explosion was a very personal affront, underscoring his inability to rein in a relentless series of Ukrainian attacks.
The explosion is emblematic of a routed Russian army. Russian forces were unable to protect the bridge, despite its central role in the war effort, its personal importance to Mr Putin and its powerful symbolism as a literal link between Russia and Crimea.
Hours after the explosion, the Kremlin appointed Gen. Sergei Surovikin, another new commander, to oversee its forces in Ukraine. Earlier leadership reshuffles did little to redress the army’s sluggish performance.
The full extent of the damage was not immediately clear. The bridge has sections for rail and automobile traffic. As of Saturday evening, the railway section of the bridge had undergone repairs and a 15-car train had successfully crossed the span, according to Russian news agency Tass. Car traffic has also resumed on the undamaged side of the bridge, Crimea leader Sergei Aksyonov said in a message on Telegram.
Even so, Russian officials, military bloggers and politicians were already calling for revenge, with one saying any response other than an “extremely tough” response would show weakness.
Any serious impediment to traffic on the bridge could have a profound effect on Russia’s ability to wage war in southern Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces are waging an increasingly effective counteroffensive. The bridge is the main military supply route connecting Russia with the Crimean Peninsula. Without this, analysts say, the Russian military will be severely limited in its ability to bring fuel, equipment and ammunition to Russian units fighting in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, two of the four Ukrainian provinces that Mr. Putin announced that Russia had annexed in September. 30.
Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee said in a statement that a truck exploded on the automobile side of the bridge, igniting seven fuel tanks being hauled by a train on a parallel rail line heading for Crimea.
It was unclear whether the driver of the truck, who died in the explosion, knew there were explosives inside. In video captured by a surveillance camera on the bridge, a huge ball of fire is seen, appearing to consume several vehicles. A small sedan and a semi-trailer truck driving side by side appear at the epicenter of the explosion. The explosion caused the partial collapse of two sections of the bridge.
For the Ukrainians, the explosion “is not necessarily a decisive victory, but the balance of the war often turns on an accumulation of lesser victories”, said Ben Barry, senior researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies , a London-based research group. . “It’s another ratchet of pressure on President Putin.”
Although there have been no official claims of responsibility, Ukrainian officials, who in the past have said the bridge would be a legitimate target for a strike, said the blast was not an accident and did not did not hide their satisfaction.
“Crimea, the bridge, the beginning,” wrote Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the Ukrainian president, in a Posting on Twitter Saturday. “Anything illegal must be destroyed. Everything that was stolen is returned to Ukraine. All Russian occupiers expelled.
Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, the Security Service of Ukraine, known by its Ukrainian acronym SBU, released a statement rephrasing a stanza from a poem by Ukrainian national poet, Taras Shevchenko. “Dawn, the bridge burns beautifully,” the agency posted on Twitter. “A nightingale in the Crimea meets the SBU”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appeared to allude to the attack when he noted in his evening speech that Saturday “was a good and generally sunny day” in Ukrainian territory. “Unfortunately it was cloudy in Crimea,” he said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry S. Peskov called the episode an “emergency” in a statement on Saturday. He said Mr Putin, who celebrated his 70th birthday on Friday, had been briefed.
“The president ordered the prime minister to form a government commission to find out the causes of the incident and eliminate the consequences as soon as possible,” Peskov said, according to Russian state media.
Occupation officials in Crimea left little doubt about who they believed to be responsible.
“Ukrainian vandals were able to reach the Crimean Bridge with their bloody hands,” said Vladimir Konstantinov, head of the Kremlin-based Crimean Parliament.
In recent weeks, military traffic crossing the bridge to Crimea has increased, as Russia has raced tanks and artillery equipment to the front lines in the Kherson region, a fertile slice of southern Ukraine that Kremlin forces occupied in the first weeks of the war. .
Ukrainian forces have stepped up their counteroffensive in the region, recapturing significant amounts of land with the aim of pushing Russian forces east across the Dnipro and liberating the city of Kherson, the only Ukrainian-controlled regional capital. by Russian forces.
Without the Kerch Strait Bridge, particularly the rail section, the Kremlin would have few good options for supplying these troops with fuel and military equipment from their stockpiles in Russia, analysts said. Transporting supplies by boat or plane to Crimea would be much more cumbersome, experts said. And a possible alternative overland supply route using southern Ukrainian territory seized by Russian forces would be vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks and would require the use of trucks, as there are no functioning rail lines.
“Essentially all heavy military traffic was going through the bridge, tanks, artillery, etc.,” said Konrad Muzyka, military analyst at Roshan Consulting.
In a statement, the Russian Defense Ministry said troops in southern Ukraine would be supplied “fully and uninterruptedly” by land and sea, although it did not explain how this could be accomplished.
The month-long bombardment of Ukraine to retake territory from retreating Russian forces in the northeast of the country continued on Saturday, and Russia stepped up its aerial bombardment of civilian infrastructure.
Early Saturday, Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine was rocked by explosions. Photos of an explosion showed a red fireball lighting up the night sky, shrouded in a cloud of black smoke. Buildings, including a medical institution, were on fire, Kharkiv Mayor Igor Terekhov wrote on Telegram. It was not immediately known if there had been any deaths or injuries.
Almost at the same time, Russian bombing also damaged the last line connecting the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to Ukrainian energy systems, cutting it off from the electricity grid that is used to cool its reactors. The plant, the largest in Europe, has been disconnected from external power at least twice before, forcing it to rely on diesel generators to power safety equipment.
Herman Galushchenko, Ukraine’s energy minister, said in a Facebook post on Saturday that there was only enough diesel fuel to run the plant for about 10 days, adding that the professionalism of Ukrainian nuclear workers was henceforth the only “guarantee against a possible nuclear accident”. ”
Whether or not Ukraine takes responsibility for the bridge explosion, the episode is reminiscent of other attacks by Ukrainian forces against highly symbolic targets and showed Ukraine’s military ingenuity in the face of a Russian army. much stronger and more heavily armed.
In April, two Ukrainian-made Neptune cruise missiles, a weapon system that had never been used in combat before, rammed the hull of the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The strike set off a series of explosions that eventually sank the cruiser, killing an unknown number of sailors, including possibly the ship’s captain.
While the attack on the Moskva stunned the Russian military establishment, it was a series of explosions over the summer on military targets in Crimea that really underscored Ukraine’s ability to strike pride of Russia and its army. The attacks, including on the critical Saki air base, have shattered the illusion that Crimea, the crown jewel of Mr Putin’s years of conquest in Ukraine, would be spared violence during the war.
Seized by Mr Putin’s forces in 2014 and illegally incorporated into Russia soon after, Crimea has gradually transformed from a peaceful summer destination in southern Ukraine into a beachhead for military operations that , before the war, had become a symbol of Russia’s imperial resurgence.
The bridge itself is an engineering marvel that cost an estimated $7.5 billion and created for the first time a physical link between the Russian Federation and Crimea, which for centuries was part of the Empire Russian before being given by the Soviet government to Ukraine in the 1950s, in what was then a largely ceremonial gesture.
The bridge allowed easier access to Crimea not only for Russian tourists, but also for the Russian military, which transported weapons and equipment to the peninsula in the years before the February invasion.
It was from Crimea that Russian forces attacked southern Ukraine, quickly engulfing large swaths of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in the Kremlin’s most successful operation in the war to date.
But, as the attack on the bridge pointed out, that success seems increasingly in jeopardy.
After the explosion, Russian officials, along with the country’s increasingly belligerent military bloggers, did not wait for confirmation that Ukraine was responsible, calling for a swift and devastating response.
“If this time we don’t respond or don’t respond just like that, it will definitely show that we are weak,” said Sergei Mironov, the leader of a pro-Kremlin political party. “This extreme audacity requires an extremely tough response.”
The report was provided by Maria Varenikova in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, Megan Specia in Kyiv, Ukraine, Cassandra Vinograd in London and Katrin Bennhold in Berlin.