Russian authorities said that a massive explosion involving a truck on Saturday caused a fire and destroyed a section of a bridge linking Russia and Crimea, killing at least three people. The bridge is regarded as a key supply route for Russian troops in southern Ukraine.
The
Crimean Bridge, a US$3.69 billion (230 billion rubles) project, was
constructed following the annexation of Crimea. Russia opened the first part of
the span to car traffic in May 2018. The parallel bridge for rail traffic
opened the following year. Before the bridge’s existence, the Crimean
Peninsula could only be reached from Russia by sea or air.
The Crimean Bridge—also called Kerch Strait Bridge or Kerch Bridge—is a structure 19 kilometers (12 miles) in length that passes across the Kerch Strait and links southern Russia to the Crimean Peninsula. The Kerch Strait links the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.
A truck exploded on the bridge. Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee announced that the explosion caused a fire on the parallel rail section, where seven railway cars carrying fuel caught fire. The blast also caused a “partial collapse of two sections of the bridge.”
The Russian Investigative Committee said in a statement that the incident killed at least three people, “presumably the passengers of a car that was driving by the truck that exploded on the bridge.”
‘The bodies of a woman and a man were recovered from the water, their identities are being established,” the statement reads, according to Russian state-owned news agency TASS.
The Crimean Peninsula is the key to sustaining Russia’s military operations in the south. If the bridge is made inoperable, it would make it significantly more challenging to ferry supplies to the peninsula. While Russia seized the areas north of Crimea early during the invasion and built a land corridor to it along the Sea of Azov, Ukraine is pressing a counteroffensive to reclaim them.
The explosion on the Crimean Bridge took place hours after multiple explosions early Saturday hit the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, which triggered a series of secondary explosions.
While no one has yet to explicitly claim public responsibility for the attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s aide, Mikhail Podoliak, posted on Twitter saying the explosion is “the beginning.”
Podoliak previously in August threatened the bridge, telling The Guardian that the bridge is “an illegal construction and the main gateway to supply the Russian army in Crimea” and that “such objects should be destroyed.”
