A few hours after a big explosion The strategic bridge linking Russia to the Crimea was destroyedA barrage of missiles Crashed in a residential area of Zaporizhia, at least 17 people were killed. There is no doubt that others are still trapped under the rubble.
This is a war crime. There are no military targets nearby. President Zelensky – with good reason – called the Russian strike “absolutely evil, absolutely demonic,” adding: “There were already thousands of them and unfortunately there could be thousands more.”
The Russians continue to target the town of 800,000 people, 50 kilometers from the nuclear power plant. At the end of September, a Russian raid on a convoy of vehicles fleeing from the Zaporizhzhya region killed at least 30 people, mostly elderly people, women and children, and wounded 88 others.
Ukraine accuses Russia of retaliating against civilians as its forces suffer catastrophic setbacks on the battlefield.
Personal insult to Putin
For Putin, who oversaw the opening of the bridge in 2018, this is a personal insult. order an investigation. The Kremlin has so far refrained from blaming Ukraine for the attack, echoing a similar restraint after the sinking of the cruiser Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
Ukraine has not officially claimed responsibility, but The New York Times I reported that a senior Ukrainian official said that Ukrainian intelligence services were involved in the operation.
Shortly after the bridge erupted, radical Russian military bloggers and analysts demanded a swift and brutal response from Moscow.
Tabloid war reporter Komsomolskaya Pravda He called on Russia to “return Ukraine to the eighteenth”.e century, without undue thought of how it would affect the civilian population.”
The explosion will not permanently disrupt important road communications from Russia to Crimea, but it will complicate Russian logistics until the bridge is repaired. Additional security checks on passing vehicles will delay the movement of military equipment and personnel to the Crimea.
Corrupt and brutal general
The explosion of the bridge is a major setback for Moscow, both symbolic and military. Nor does it bode well for Moscow’s already turbulent efforts to hold the Kherson region in southern Ukraine and Crimea itself.
Putin appointed another new general to lead his forces in Ukraine. General Sergei Surovkin was in prison twice. One for selling weapons and the other for leading a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters during the failed 1991 coup attempt in Moscow that left three of them dead.
