Damage to Crimean Bridge Captured in Satellite Images

Satellite images taken on Monday, July 17, captured damage on a bridge linking Crimea to Russia’s Krasnodar Krai over the Kerch Strait after Russian authorities accused Ukrainian forces of carrying out an attack.

Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee said Ukrainian forces struck the bridge with two unmanned sea drones shortly after 3 am, killing two adults and injuring one child.

Sergey Aksyonov, the Russian-installed head of Crimea’s occupying government, advised people to avoid the bridge and take alternative routes through occupied areas of Ukraine’s Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Donetsk oblasts.

President Vladimir Putin called an emergency meeting of the Government Commission on the Crimean Bridge that was attended by Aksyonov, Deputy Prime Minister for Construction and Regional Development Marat Khusnullin, Minister of Transport Vitaly Savelyev, Governor of Krasnodar Krai Veniamin Kondratyev, and the Russian-installed head of occupied Kherson, Vladimir Saldo, according to a Kremlin press release.

Khusnullin said road sections of the bridge were damaged and traffic was suspended, but said the railway parts of the bridge were still operational. Authorities were hoping to reintroduce two-way traffic by September 15, Khusnullin said.

Putin instructed Khusnullin to begin repairs “as quickly as possible” and called for “concrete proposals to improve the security” of the bridge, the Kremlin said.

Ukraine had not officially commented on the incident but, after the explosions, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) reposted its comment from October last year, when an explosion caused part of the bridge to collapse. “Again, the bridge went ‘to sleep’ again,” the SBU’s post read, according to a machine translation. Credit: Maxar via Storyful

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