Evgeny Poddubny, war correspondent for state media RT, said no one in the Ukrainian leadership seemed to fear Russia anymore.
“The enemy has ceased to be afraid, and this circumstance must be corrected quickly,” he wrote on RT’s Telegram channel. “Commanders of formations, heads of intelligence agencies, politicians of the Kyiv criminal regime sleep peacefully, wake up without a headache and in a good mood, without the feeling of inevitability of punishment for the crimes committed.”
Aleksandr Kots, war correspondent for Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, wrote on Telegram that the attack on the bridge boded ill for Moscow’s already troubled efforts to retain territory in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine, and foreshadowed most likely a future attack on Crimea itself.
He called the “consistency” Ukraine was showing in the war “enviable” and called on Russia to “push Ukraine into the 18th century, without thinking unnecessarily about how this will affect the civilian population”. .
The potential for retaliatory attacks has clouded the festive atmosphere in Ukraine in the aftermath of the attack on the Kerch Strait bridge. Those shopping in Kyiv on Sunday reflected on the unease they now feel about what might happen next.
“Everyone is anxious, I think,” said 50-year-old Volodymyr Stelmakh.
The attack, he said, only raised alarm bells for Ukrainians, especially those in Russian-occupied areas, that something worse could be coming.
“I don’t think it will happen right away,” said Veacheslav Tuceac, 32, who was born in Moldova and moved to Ukraine a few years ago with his wife. But the attack on the bridge, he fears, could be “the start of a chain of events”.