The Kerch bridge, Russia’s only road link to Crimea, has been targeted once again in what seems to have been a drone attack. The damage appears to be extensive may take weeks, if not months, to repair. The Russian-installed head of the Crimean parliament, Vladimir Konstatinov, has blamed the ‘terrorist regime in Kyiv’ for a ‘new crime’ – but in Kyiv, it will be seen as an audacious attack on a legitimate military target. This attack underlines the vulnerability of Russia’s most important assets to a new wave of Ukrainian drones.
The Ukrainian military has made no secret of the fact they consider the bridge to be a legitimate military target
Ukrainian media is reporting that Kyiv’s navy and security services were behind the explosions, and that drones were used to blow up the bridge. The newspaper RBK-Ukraine quotes an unnamed source in Ukraine’s security services who said, ‘The bridge was attacked with surface drones. It was difficult to reach the bridge, but in the end it was possible.’
As has become customary for Ukraine, the country’s authorities are yet to comment on the incident or claim responsibility for it. Footage circulating on social media shows the aftermath of the two explosions on the bridge, with plumes of rising smoke and a portion of the bridge’s illumination cutting out. Meanwhile videos of the incident’s aftermath taken this morning show a mangled and shattered portion of the bridge’s metal and concrete structure.
The Russian authorities have confirmed that a couple from the Russian region of Belgorod which borders Ukraine, were killed in the incident with their teenage daughter hospitalised with serious injuries. The Kremlin has gone a step further than Konstatinov. The Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova baselessly claimed that this attack was carried out by Ukraine with backing from American and British intelligence.
Just hours after the attack on the bridge, a vast feat of engineering which opened just five years ago, the Kremlin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov announced that Russia has pulled out of the Black Sea grain deal to allow the international export of grain from Ukraine’s ports. Peskov claimed that the decision to suspend Russia’s participation in the deal, brokered last year by the UN and Turkey, had nothing to do with this morning’s events. Calling them ‘absolutely unrelated events’, Peskov said that ‘even before the terrorist attack, this position was declared by President Putin’ after certain conditions for the deal’s extension had not been fulfilled.
Whoever is responsible, this is the second time in less than a year that the Kerch bridge has been targeted in an attack. Last October, a 250-metre portion of the bridge’s road and rail route was blown up, using explosives planted in a civilian truck that was crossing the bridge at the time. While it was widely suspected that Ukraine was responsible, this remains unconfirmed. But over the past year, the Ukrainian military has made no secret of the fact they consider the bridge to be a legitimate military target.
As a result of that first attack, the bridge underwent several months of intensive repair works and was only fully reopened again in February of this year. Much to the irritation of Russian tourists, ever since the bridge reopened, additional security checks introduced for vehicles going on to the bridge have been causing hours-long tailbacks.
While damage to the Kerch bridge is seemingly less severe this time around, with the bridge’s rail route apparently unharmed, this attack once more has the potential to cause logistical challenges to Russia’s war effort in Ukraine and its occupation of Crimea. With Ukraine’s counter-offensive well under way, the Ukrainian army will have been looking for ways to disrupt Russia’s ability to support its troops occupying Crimea and the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson.
As the only vehicular route to directly link Crimea and Russia, while the road is out of action, any Russians trying to get to and from the peninsula will be forced to travel through the Russian-occupied territories of Donetsk or Luhansk, closer to the front line and therefore more dangerous. According to one Crimean government source, the bridge might take up to a month to fix.
For Putin, the Kerch bridge holds a special significance, a physical symbol of his efforts to incorporate Crimea, and more widely Ukraine, into Russia. Such was the importance of the bridge, the president personally opened it upon its completion in 2018, driving an enormous truck across it. Therefore, in Ukraine’s eyes, there are not only practical incentives for targeting the bridge, but symbolic ones too: to destroy it permanently would be to destroy a key colonial symbol of Putin’s occupation.
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