Watch Russia’s Lone Bridge To Crimea In Flames—Here’s What It Means For Putin’s War Efforts

Topline

An explosion set fire to and destroyed sections of Russia’s only bridge to Crimea, isolating Russia and its troops from the critical Black Sea peninsula at a critical moment in the war, though the cause for the explosion remains unclear, with Ukraine not quite taking responsibility for it.

Black smoke billows from a fire on the Kerch bridge that links Crimea to Russia.

AFP via Getty Images

Key Facts

Russian state media TASS reported a fuel storage tank caught fire Saturday morning, causing two fuel tanks to explode, killing three and abruptly halting vehicle and railway traffic on the Kerch Strait Bridge.

Local officials said the fire did not damage the bridge’s archways, posing no threat to maritime traffic in and out of the Sea of Azov.

Two sections of the six-year-old bridge, connecting Russia with the peninsula, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014, collapsed in the explosion, although the total extent of the damage has not yet been determined.

Not only does the bridge support vehicle traffic for commuters and the transportation of goods, it’s also Moscow’s main military link for fuel, troops, artillery and equipment to Crimea, meaning the explosion could pose a critical blow as Putin intensifies his war effort.

Russian spokesperson Dmitri Peskov called the explosion an “emergency” in a statement cited by the New York Times, but the head of Crimea’s Parliament, Vladimir Konstantinov, called the damage “insignificant,” the Kyiv Indipendent reported, despite videos and photos on social media showing the bridge’s two lanes shaking and parts of it collapsed.

What We Don’t Know

If it was a military strike. Russia claims the owner of the truck that exploded was a resident of Russia’s Krasnodar region, east of the Crimean peninsula, TASS reported. Ukraine’s government simply stated in a Twitter post shortly after the explosion: “sick burn,” while Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu congratulated Ukraine’s special operations units, which he said are expected to have led the explosion. But responsibility for the incident remains unconfirmed.

Key Background

The explosion comes as Putin has escalated Russia’s invasion, calling up an additional 300,000 reserve troops and threatening to use nuclear weapons, after retreating from territory it had gained in the eastern Kharkiv region. The Kerch Strait Bridge is the only bridge connecting Russia to Crimea, which Putin has referred to as a “sacred place,” following his annexation eight years ago. In recent months, however, Ukrainian forces have conducted a counteroffensive in regions in eastern Ukraine, forcing Russian troops to surrender, and in areas along the Black Sea, including Crimea. In August, Ukraine special forces destroyed a Russian ammunition depot at an airfield in the Dzhankoi area of Crimea, Russian outlet Kommersant reported, which Putin blamed on saboteurs. In the days after the attack, more than 38,000 vehicles crossed the Kerch Strait Bridge, with most leaving Crimea, according to Ukraine’s advisor to the minister of internal affairs Anton Geraschenko.

Surprising Fact

Ukraine’s postal service announced it would create a stamp to commemorate the explosion, a move it’s done before, most famously after Ukrainian forces refused to surrender to a Russian attack at Snake Island, a critical Black Sea naval outpost. That immensely popular stamp pictured a Ukrainian soldier holding up their middle finger to a Russian warship, and was seen as a galvanizing sign of Ukrainian unification and resistance to Putin’s invasion.

A screen grab from a surveillance footage shows flames and smoke rising up after an explosion at the … [+] Kerch Strait Bridge.

Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

A motivation for the explosion has not yet been determined.