Russia halts traffic over Crimea bridge after reports of explosion

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Moscow-installed authorities in Crimea have halted traffic on the bridge connecting the occupied peninsula to Russia after reports of an explosion that caused parts of it to collapse, killing two people early on Monday.

If confirmed to be a second Ukrainian attack on the Crimea bridge, opened with great fanfare by Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2018, it would deal another humiliating blow to the Kremlin’s prestige, and possibly to its ability to supply troops occupying Ukraine’s southern regions.

Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-appointed head of Crimea, said the bridge, which carries road and rail traffic, was closed due to an “emergency”.

Viacheslav Gladkov, the governor of Russia’s Belgorod region which borders Ukraine, said a man and a woman from the region had been killed in the explosion. Their 14-year-old daughter was in hospital in a stable condition.

Mash, an online news outlet with close ties to Russia’s police, posted videos showing that one span on the bridge had collapsed and another had begun to sink into the waters of the Kerch Strait below.

It said investigators had found traces from jet skis near the site of the explosion and claimed Ukraine had begun to use them as explosive-carrying underwater drones.

The bridge was previously damaged in an attack in October that forced Russian authorities to close it temporarily. The structure was fully repaired after months of reconstruction.

Ukraine didn’t immediately take credit for that strike, though last week deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar called it “the first blow on the Crimean bridge to break the logistics of the Russians”.

Russian authorities did not say how badly the bridge was damaged in Monday’s attack but claimed the railway tracks had not been harmed in the blast and promised traffic would soon resume.

On social media app Telegram, several videos appeared to show the blast before sunrise, while others showed smoke rising from the bridge, a crushed vehicle and cars backed up for kilometres nearby.

Ukrainian officials did not take responsibility for the explosion. But several top officials and Ukraine’s security service gloated on social media, while Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, reiterated Kyiv’s position that the bridge was a legitimate military target.

“Any illegal structures used to deliver Russian instruments of mass murder are necessarily shortlived . . . regardless of the reasons for the destruction,” Podolyak wrote on Twitter.

Andriy Yusov, a representative of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine, declined to comment when asked by Ukraine’s public broadcaster Suspilne if Kyiv was behind the attack. But he said it could hinder Russian logistics.

“Any logistical problems are additional complications for the occupiers, which create potential advantages for the Ukrainian defence forces,” Yusov said.

The bridge is a crucial link between Russia and occupied Ukrainian territories and is used to transport troops, tanks and other military supplies for the Kremlin’s invasion forces fighting in southern Ukraine.

The only other supply route is via the so-called “land bridge” that Moscow created by invading and occupying southern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, which Putin claimed to “annex” in September.

But that route is narrow and fraught with challenges, as Ukrainian brigades focus their attention on trying to cut off the land bridge in their counteroffensive.

Russian holidaymakers have continued to flock to Crimea, a popular vacation destination, even as the peninsula has become a target for air and drone strikes during the war.

Occupation authorities urged people to drive over the “land bridge” and insisted the peninsula had sufficient supplies of food and fuel.

The 12-mile bridge over the Kerch strait was a special project of Putin’s. Built for $3bn after Russia’s illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea, it was completed in 2018, with Putin marking the occasion by driving a Kamaz truck over the bridge.