KHARKIV, Ukraine — At least three people were killed Saturday when an explosion rocked the bridge that connects Crimea with Russia, damaging a key supply route to Ukraine, Russian officials said.
Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee said in a statement that a truck exploded on the 12-mile-long Kerch Strait Bridge, igniting seven fuel cisterns being pulled by train on a parallel railroad crossing heading toward Crimea, The New York Times reported. The fireball caused two car spans on the bridge to partially collapse, according to the newspaper.
Update 3:32 p.m. EDT Oct. 8: Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree tightening security for the 12-mile Kerch Bridge that connects Russia to Crimea, The Associated Press reported. The decree also called for energy infrastructure between Crimea and Russia.
According to a statement by the Kremlin, Russia’s federal security service, the FSB, was put in charge of the effort.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy indirectly acknowledged the attack but did not address its cause.
“Today was a good and mostly sunny day on the territory of our state,” Zelenskyy said in a video address. “Unfortunately, it was cloudy in Crimea.”
Update 2:45 p.m. EDT Oct. 8: Light traffic has resumed on the Kerch Strait Bridge, hours after an explosion rocked the lone link from Russia to Crimea, the BBC reported.
The railway part of the bridge -- where oil tankers caught fire -- has also apparently reopened, according to the news organization.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the government had no timeline for restoring the 12-mile bridge to fully operational status, according to The Washington Post.
Breaking News: A fire erupted on the sole bridge linking Crimea to Russia, imperiling a primary supply route for Russian troops in Ukraine. https://t.co/EkNyQW67ea
— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 8, 2022
Original report: The cause of the blast was not immediately clear, The Washington Post reported. The speaker of Crimea’s Russian-backed regional parliament accused Ukraine, according to The Associated Press.
The explosion came a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin celebrated his 70th birthday.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri S. Peskov called the explosion an “emergency” in a statement, the Times reported. He said that Putin had been briefed about the incident.
“The president directed the prime minister to form a government commission to find out the causes of the incident and eliminate the consequences as soon as possible,” Peskov said in the statement, according to Russian state media.
In a statement on its Telegram channel, the Committee said that the people killed were “presumably” passengers of a car that was next to the truck that had blown up, CNN reported.
“Currently, the bodies of two victims have already been taken from the water -- a man and a woman. Their identities are being established,” the statement said.
The bridge, which links the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, opened in 2018 and is the longest in Europe, according to the AP. Putin personally opened the $4 billion span, according to the Post.
Officials in Crimea blamed Ukraine for the explosion.
“Ukrainian vandals were able to reach the Crimean bridge with their bloody hands,” Vladimir Konstantinov, the head of Crimea’s Parliament, said in a statement.
Ukrainian officials did not immediately comment on the cause of the fire, the Times reported.
“Crimea, the bridge, the beginning,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wrote in a Twitter post on Saturday. “Everything illegal must be destroyed. Everything stolen returned to Ukraine. All Russian occupiers expelled.”
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