Kyiv, Ukraine — President Vladimir Putin on Sunday accused Ukraine of orchestrating the attack on a key Russian link to occupied Crimea, injecting new, heightened stakes into a calamitous episode that Ukrainian leaders presented as proof of their ability to prevail in the war with Russia.
Russian investigators said they quickly identified suspects in the pre-dawn fireball Saturday that sent sections of the Crimea bridge, a $4 billion project that symbolizes Russia’s ambitions to control Ukraine, sinks in the waters of the Kertx Strait. A day after the incident, which Russia’s main law enforcement agency deemed a terrorist attack, Putin announced that Ukraine’s special services were responsible.
“There is no doubt that the attack was aimed at destroying the critical civilian infrastructure of the Russian Federation,” Putin said in a video released by the Kremlin. The 12-mile-long route, while used by civilians, is also a crucial military logistics route for Russia’s armed forces, the only direct road and rail route from mainland Russia to Crimea.
The incident sent shockwaves across the region, shattering Kremlin assurances about the bridge’s invincibility and heightening the challenges Russia faces in stemming a Ukrainian counter-offensive that has retaken occupied areas in the south and east of the country.
Although Russian officials said limited road and rail traffic would continue, the substantial damage to the bridge posed an immediate logistical challenge to Moscow’s military offensive. Putin personally inaugurated the bridge in 2018, in a move designed to consolidate Russia’s control over the peninsula, which was illegally annexed in 2014.
Although the Ukrainian government did not publicly claim responsibility for the incident, officials in Kyiv sought to use the explosion as proof of their ability to achieve a battlefield victory against the bigger and better army armed by Russia, a prospect many Western officials dismissed as only a few. months ago
A Ukrainian official told the Washington Post on Saturday that Ukraine’s special services were behind the explosion, which Russian authorities said occurred when a truck exploded and ignited the fuel tanks of a train that was happening
Putin’s dream bridge bursts into flames
Speaking on video with Putin, Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, said the truck in the incident, which also involved Russians and other nationals, came from Bulgaria through Georgia and into Russia before be driven to the Crimea.
Ukrainian officials dismissed the Russian statements and condemned Russia for the overnight missile attacks that authorities say killed at least 14 people and wounded at least 70, including 11 children, in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia. After the attack, officials released photos of a partially destroyed apartment building, where the central section had collapsed into a pile of rubble.
“Putin accuses Ukraine of terrorism? It sounds too cynical even for Russia,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said on Twitter. “There is only one terrorist state here and the whole world knows who it is.”
Russia has repeatedly hit civilian targets since its February 24 invasion, including hospitals, schools, apartment buildings and railway stations.
In Zaporizhzhia, at least eight people were pulled from the rubble after the attack, Oleksandr Starukh, governor of the Zaporizhzhia region, said on Sunday.
As rescuers worked to clear the debris the next night, another airstrike devastated the area, Starukh said. Around 2 a.m. Monday local time, Starukh warned people in Zaporizhzhia to take cover because of an incoming airstrike, according to his Telegram account. About an hour later, he said a residential building had been destroyed.
The destruction highlighted the potential for Russian retaliation for the bridge incident and the continued vulnerability of Ukrainian cities despite massive arms shipments provided by the United States and European nations in recent months.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the Zaporizhzhia attack provided further proof that Ukrainian supporters should speed up this supply. “We urgently need more modern air and missile defense systems to save innocent lives,” he said on Twitter.
Kyiv officials hope the bridge incident, whatever its cause, will provide additional fuel to their campaign to attract expanded support from the West, including longer-range missiles and tanks, and in turn convince troops Russians and the Russian public that the war is a lost cause.
Simon Schlegel, a Ukraine expert at the International Crisis Group, said road routes through Russian-held territory to the strategic city of Kherson, which Russia is expected to defend vigorously, they were not an ideal substitute for the Crimean bridge because they are closer to Ukraine. military positions
Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister who now serves as an adviser to Zelensky’s government, said the psychological impact of the bridge incident may be greater than even the resulting logistical challenges for Russia.
“It destroys the confidence of the Russian military, the Russian government and even the Russian people in general in their inability to manage risks and their inability to protect,” he said. “And this is very important”.
Michael Carpenter, the US ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, called the Zaporizhzhia attack “barbaric. … We will have to keep going deeper,” he said on Twitter. “More military assistance, more aid, more sanctions.”
Russian authorities tried to telegraph normality after the bridge explosion, despite what appeared to be severe damage to the structure.
In a message on his Telegram channel, Sergei Aksyonov, head of the Crimea region, showed a photo of an undisturbed section of the bridge and said officials were working to regularize transport between Crimea and the Krasnodar region from Russia He said normal rail services had resumed, but for now only cars were crossing the bridge, while buses and heavy vehicles were traveling by ferry.
Russia’s transport ministry reported on Sunday that passenger and freight trains were regularly passing through the bridge on Sunday morning. He said commuter rail service would resume that evening, according to Interfax.
It was unclear whether truck-borne explosives or something else caused the incident.
Baza, a Russian news outlet that frequently reports on leaked information, said on its Telegram channel that the driver of the truck that Russian authorities said exploded on the bridge had been hired to deliver a cargo shipment to Simferopol, a city in Crimea. The driver was supposed to pay 48,000 rubles, or about $770, Baza reported.
It was hired on Oct. 6 and loaded the cargo in the Russian city of Armavir on Oct. 7, stopping to sleep just before the bridge and leaving early the next morning, he said.
“He told his family, after the call he turned off the phone,” Baza said. Video published by a Russian state newspaper showed the explosion occurred at 6:03 a.m., when few vehicles were traveling on the bridge.
Officials in St. Petersburg named the other two people who authorities said died in the blast as Eduard Chuchakin and Zoya Sofronova, a married couple who worked as historians and documentarians. Authorities said his car was driving near the truck that exploded.
The attack may also intensify domestic pressure Putin faces over battlefield setbacks. The Russian leader is due to hold a meeting of the Security Council on Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Already, prominent Russians are calling for retaliation, including lawmakers and media figures such as Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the state-run RT channel. After the explosion, he asked in a tweet: “So?”
Dmitri Medvedev, deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, called for a forceful response.
“Russia’s response to this crime can only be the direct destruction of the terrorists. The way it is generally done in the world,” he said in an interview with journalist Nadana Friedrichson, which was published on his Telegram channel. “This is what the citizens of Russia are waiting for.”
Isabelle Khurhudyan in Kryvyi Rih, Kostiantyn Khudov in Kyiv and John Hudson in Washington contributed to this report.
War in Ukraine: what you need to know
The last: Russian President Vladimir Putin signed decrees on Friday to annex four occupied regions of Ukraine, following referendums that were widely denounced as illegal. Follow our live updates here.
The answer: The Biden administration announced a new round of sanctions on Russia on Friday in response to the annexations, targeting government officials and their relatives, Russian and Belarusian military officials and defense procurement networks. President Volodymyr Zelensky also said Friday that Ukraine is seeking “accelerated accession” to NATO, in an apparent response to the annexations.
In Russia: Putin declared a military mobilization on September 21 to call up up to 300,000 reservists in a dramatic bid to reverse the setbacks in his war against Ukraine. The announcement led to an exodus of more than 180,000 people, most of whom were conscripted men, and renewed protests and other acts of defiance against the war.
The fight: Ukraine mounted a successful counteroffensive that forced a major Russian retreat in the northeastern Kharkiv region in early September, as troops fled towns and villages they had occupied since the first days of the war and abandoned large amounts of military equipment.
Pictures: Washington Post photographers have been on the ground since the beginning of the war; here are some of his most powerful works.
How you can help: Here are ways that those in the United States can support the Ukrainian people, as well as what people around the world have given.
Read our full…