KYIV, Oct 8 (Reuters) – A powerful blast damaged Russia’s road-and-rail bridge to Crimea on Saturday, hitting a prestigious symbol of Moscow’s annexation of the peninsula and the key supply route to forces battling to hold territory captured in southern Ukraine.

The early morning explosion on the bridge over the Kerch Strait, for which Russia did not immediately assign blame, prompted gleeful messages from Ukrainian officials but no claim of responsibility.

President Vladimir Putin signed a decree instructing tighter security for the bridge as well as the infrastructure supplying electricity and natural gas to the peninsula.

He also ordered a commission be set up to investigate.

Russian officials said three people had been killed, probably the occupants of a car travelling near a truck that blew up. Seven fuel tanker wagons on a 59-wagon train heading for the peninsula on the bridge’s upper level also caught fire.

Limited road traffic resumed about 10 hours later, and the Transport Ministry cleared rail traffic to restart.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin ordered that the collapsed section of the bridge be dismantled immediately, domestic news agencies reported.

Divers are to start examining the damage at 6 a.m. local time (0300 GMT) on Sunday and a more detailed survey above the waterline should be completed by the end of the day, they quoted him as saying.

Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and the 19-km (12-mile) Crimean Bridge linking it to Russia’s transport network was opened with great fanfare four years later by Putin.

It is a major artery for Russian forces who control most of southern Ukraine’s Kherson region, and for the Russian naval port of Sevastopol, whose governor told locals: “Keep calm. Don’t panic.”

It was not yet clear if the blast was a deliberate attack, but the damage to such high-profile infrastructure came as Russia has suffered several battlefield defeats and could further cloud Kremlin messages of reassurance that the conflict is going to plan.

“The situation is manageable – it’s unpleasant, but not fatal,” Crimea’s Russian governor Sergei Aksyonov told reporters. “Of course, emotions have been triggered, and there is a healthy desire to seek revenge.”

He earlier said the peninsula had a month’s worth of fuel and more than two months’ worth of food.

The blast took place a day after Putin’s 70th birthday, and coincided with the naming of Air Force General Sergei Surovikin, Russia’s third senior military appointment in a week, to take charge of the invasion effort.

‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MR PRESIDENT’

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy did not refer to the blast in a video address on Saturday, saying merely that the weather in Crimea was cloudy.

“But however cloudy it is, Ukrainians know … our future is sunny. This is a future without occupiers, across our territory, particularly in Crimea,” he said.

The head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council posted a video of the bridge on social media alongside a video of Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy birthday, Mr President”.

Since the war started on Feb. 24, Ukrainian officials have regularly suggested they want to destroy the bridge. Ukraine’s postal service said it would print a special stamp.

Zelenskiy advisor Mykhailo Podolyak said the fact the truck was travelling from Russia showed the blast had been arranged by Russian operators.

“Undoubtedly, we are witnessing the beginning of large-scale negative processes in Russia,” he said in a commentary, blaming infighting among Putin’s circle.

Earlier, he tweeted the incident was just “the beginning”.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said forces in southern Ukraine could be “fully supplied” through existing land and sea routes.

The Transport Ministry said road traffic for light vehicles and buses had resumed in alternating directions on the intact half of the roadway. Goods vehicles were being referred to a ferry service.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Kyiv’s reaction to the destruction of civilian infrastructure “testifies to its terrorist nature”.

The Russian National Anti-Terrorism Committee said a freight truck had blown up on the bridge’s roadway at 6:07 a.m. (0307 GMT). It said two spans of road bridge had partially collapsed, but that the arch spanning the channel through which ships travel between the Black Sea and Azov Sea was not damaged.

Emergencies Minister Alexander Kurenkov told Tass that quick-thinking railway workers had uncoupled the seven burning fuel wagons, preventing the blaze from spreading to the remaining 52 wagons.

Images showed one half of the roadway blown away, and the other half still attached.

LOGISTIC PROBLEMS

Moscow has presented largely Russian-speaking Crimea as a historic part of Russia and, especially this year, one where its citizens could holiday.

Kirill Stremousov, the Russian-installed deputy administrator of the Kherson region, said the blast “will not affect army supply very much”.

“But there will be problems with logistics for Crimea,” he added in a social media post.

Mykola Bielieskov of the Ukrainian Institute of Strategic Studies, which advises the presidency in Kyiv, said the bridge was irreplaceable for Russia’s forces.

Although troops have seized a stretch of coastal Ukraine linking the Kherson region and Crimea to Russia, Bielieskov said transport connections were poor, and that Russia preferred to send reinforcements to Kherson along the more circuitous route of the bridge.

James Nixey of the British-based Chatham House think tank said: “Conceivably the Russians can rebuild it, but they can’t defend it while losing a war.”

Reporting by Reuters
Editing by Frances Kerry, David Ljunggren and Alistair Bell

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Friends, rivals and enemies took their seats in the Grand Kremlin Palace as Vladimir Putin gathered the country’s elite to formalise Russia’s illegal annexation of four occupied regions in Ukraine.

The ceremony was meant to portray strength and unity, but within 24 hours had been overshadowed by Russia’s failures on the battlefield. These losses, which continued into this week on the southern and eastern fronts in Ukraine, have led to a major, unprecedented rupture within the ruling class as the Kremlin seeks scapegoats for a series of military embarrassments.

The following account is based on 15 interviews with former government and defence officials, members of the military, political observers, journalists, opposition members, and an inmate at a prison where Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin recruited soldiers to join his mercenary group in Ukraine.

Ukrainian advances

The seven-month-long Russian invasion of its neighbour has plunged the Russian ruling elite into uncertainty, the sources say, and within it a growing understanding the war cannot be won.

Some ambitious officials have seen opportunity in the chaos, pitching to the Kremlin on ways to turn around a failing war and a botched mobilisation. Others are lying low, seeking to hold on to power or avoid punishment. Western intelligence agencies have reported high levels of dissatisfaction among the Russian army and in the country’s elite. Some have even suggested a coup could take place.

Two of Vladimir Putin’s most notorious lieutenants, Prigozhin and the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, have openly declared war against the defence minister, Putin loyalist Sergei Shoigu, and his top generals following a series of disastrous defeats that have left Russia’s army in retreat.

Vladimir Putin and Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu in August 2022. Photograph: AP

“Putin is a very destructive personality, he will play the different factions off each other and see what the best outcome will be,” a former defence ministry official told the Guardian. “He doesn’t know how to fix relationships, so in the end, someone will fall victim. Putin just wants to see what is best for him and the war in Ukraine.”

Marat Gabidullin, a former Wagner commander who knows Prigozhin from his time at the paramilitary group, said he wasn’t “surprised to see Prigozhin stepping into the spotlight” at this moment.

“On the current wave of patriotism, he wants to position himself as a fierce defender of the motherland who created a professional military organisation. He wants to show that he can fight better than the regular army. We always had tensions with the ministry of defence, we really didn’t like each other.”

According to a former senior defence official who worked with Shoigu and Prigozhin, the rivalry between the two men is a longstanding feud that goes back to the founding of Wagner in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea. It was exacerbated, the person said, when Shoigu recently fired deputy defence minister Dmitry Bulgakov, an official who had reportedly helped Prigozhin obtain lucrative contracts supplying the army.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, right, with Putin in 2010. The Wagner founder previously held the Kremlin’s catering contracts. Photograph: Alexey Druzhinin/Sputnik/AFP/Getty Images

“Prigozhin will now be out for revenge against Shoigu,” that person said. He described Prigozhin as a person with “no morals, no conscience, and no hobbies … He is a machine in the bad sense of the word.”

Prigozhin has found an unlikely ally in Kadyrov, the volatile leader of Chechnya who has established the North Caucasus republic as a personal fiefdom in exchange for securing its loyalty to Russia. Yet in the recent conflict, he has emerged as one of the harshest critics of the Russian defence ministry, claiming his own fighters could take Kyiv within days even after the Russian army had been repulsed.

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Photograph: Sputnik/Reuters

Shortly after the Russian defeat last week at Lyman, a crucial railway hub in the Donetsk region, Kadyrov unleashed a withering attack on the Russian general staff and at the central military district commander Alexander Lapin responsible for the city’s defence.

“The shame isn’t that Lapin is incompetent,” Kadyrov wrote on Telegram. “It’s that he’s being shielded from above by the leadership in the General Staff. If it was up to me, I would bust him down to a private, take away his medals and send him with a rifle to the front in order to cleanse his shame in blood.”

“Military nepotism will not lead anywhere good,” he added.

“Beautiful, Ramzan, keep it up,” Prigozhin chimed in. “These punks should be shipped to the front barefoot with machine guns.”

Putin for years has pitted his underlings against one another in order to prevent them from uniting against him. Since early in the war, rumours have circulated through Moscow about fistfights at the Kremlin involving Shoigu and other officials (none have been confirmed).

“This balancing game might work in peacetime, but right now it distracts from the war efforts,” said Marat Gelman, a former adviser to Vladimir Putin and now a critic of the Kremlin leader.

These kinds of public spats are “new, important, and unprecedented too”, said Dmitry Oreshkin, a veteran Russian political scientist. “We haven’t seen such an open and public battle amongst the elites before for Putin’s attention.”

A Ukrainian soldier waves from an armoured personnel carrier outside Kramatorsk. Photograph: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

One Chechnya watcher said that Kadyrov’s criticism of the military reflected his ambitions to be “something more than just the head of a region”. The former defence official similarly said that Kadyrov was aiming for a senior role in the government.

“He knows that war is his time to shine, he has to strike now,” the former defence official said.

“Everyone is playing the blame game, and Kadyrov is at the forefront of it,” said Farida Rustamova, a Russian journalist who has written on divisions in the Russian elite. “He sees himself as one of the leaders of the war. Like the son Putin never had. It feels like a snowball that is getting bigger and bigger with every defeat.”

The two men are not the only ones leading a pile-on against the Russian military. TV propagandists such as Margarita Simonyan and Vladimir Soloviev have openly criticised the execution of the draft, accusing the military of fomenting instability in the country by attempting to recruit Russians unfit for service.

Margarita Simonyan and Putin during the St Petersburg Economic Forum in June. Photograph: Getty Images

“Our people are not stupid,” said Andrei Kartapolov, a former army general and head of the State Duma’s defence committee, while accusing the military of lying in its daily updates on the war. “They can see that they are not being told the truth.”

A Russian-installed official in Ukraine even suggested Shoigu should shoot himself because of failures in the Ukraine conflict.

The attacks on the defence ministry come at one of the most dangerous moments in the war, after Russia’s army has lost thousands of square miles of territory and has been unable to stabilise its lines in Kharkiv, Donetsk or now in the Kherson region.

“The Kremlin is looking for scapegoats. There have been three obvious failures: the start of the war, the latest military failures, and the botched mobilisation,” said Gelman, the former Putin adviser.

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Shoigu and other top military officials are the obvious target. Once seen by Russia’s public as the man who modernised Russia’s army and oversaw the successful 2014 Crimea operation, Shoigu is now facing a backlash for the military’s failures. And there are clear temptations to sack him.

“There are always ways to let off pressure,” said a well-connected Moscow political observer, who asked not to be named when discussing the military. “We have a wonderful minister of defence. A fantastic chief of the general army staff. If the defeats continue … there are always possibilities [to sack them]. And everyone will support it. They’ll say [Putin’s] finally acting tough, punishing the guilty.”

Russian soldiers stand on Red Square ahead of the ceremony to mark Moscow’s illegal annexation of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Photograph: Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images

The feeling may be mutual. According to the former defence official, “knowing Shoigu, I truly believe he would be happy to get sacked right now. He wants out of this mess.”

The native of Tuva had always been an unenthusiastic supporter of the 2014 war in the Donbas but was overruled by a cadre of hawkish Kremlin advisers including Nikolai Patrushev, the person said. He also was not in favour of the more recent “annexations” of occupied Ukrainian territory, he added.

But Putin knows he can trust Shoigu and sacking him would be deeply embarrassing, said that official.

“Even if Shiogu isn’t happy with what is happening, he’ll always be loyal to Putin and do his job,” the person said. “Putin knows he can fully trust him.”

That reflected a sense among a number of Russian elites that despite the challenges posed by the upstarts that the weight of Russia’s main ministries: the army, FSB, police and others would far exceed the threat posed by them.

Kadyrov didn’t have the authority to tell Putin to replace his defence minister, said a former top official. And Kadyrov was considerably more measured in his private interactions with Putin than in his public statements, the person said. Prigozhin, meanwhile, was just an “operator”.

“I cannot imagine that the FSB would allow either Prigozhin or Kadyrov to acquire any political power,” said Yevgenia Albats, a Russian investigative journalist and editor of the New Times. “It’s impossible.”

Albats, who recently left Russia after being targeted repeatedly for her reporting, said that her contacts among Russian officials estimated that at least 70% of top officials – people she referred to as the nomenklatura – were opposed to the war.

Another well-connected journalist who works on state television said that “intense dread” has taken hold of much of the political elite.

“The higher you go, the more desperation you feel. There is general understanding now that the war can’t be won.”

A destroyed convoy belonging to Russian forces who withdrew from the Donetsk city of Lyman. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Albats said that for now, the opposition to the war that has taken hold among senior officials was unlikely to threaten Putin himself.

“They’re very afraid. Even people I have known for my life, known for several decades, my friends. We no longer can meet because I became so toxic.”

“For there to be a schism people need to stop being afraid,” Albats said. “Where should these guys even meet? The phones are tapped, the flats are tapped.”

Oreshkin, the political scientist, said the risks for any party to move against Putin was simply too high.

“This whole system is built around a vozdh, a leader. If you get rid of Putin you have to be able to deliver quick results, but everyone knows that is not possible right now.”

On the other extreme, Kadyrov and Prigozhin’s macho personas appear to have filtered into the Kremlin. One person who knows Sergei Kiriyenko, a presidential administration figure who had been tasked with managing politics in the occupied territories, said his decision to dress in fatigues and visit the region was probably inspired by them: “In the time of the freaks, you have to dress up as one too,” he said.

Valery Fyodorov, head of the state-run WCIOM polling centre, said that Prigozhin is still largely unknown, and until a video of him at a prison surfaced last month, he was a “man without a face”.

But Kadyrov polls well even among Russians, he said. “He says the right things … He presents himself as a foot-soldier soldier of Putin. And that’s how people view him … he doesn’t position himself like a Chechen fighter, but like a Russian one.”

And in a time when Russian military officials are seen as dithering and duplicitous, a swaggering ex-con with his own private army may be dangerous.

“Prigozhin spoke with a lot of confidence,” said Ivan, an inmate at the penal colony No 8 in the Tambov region. “We all listened when he spoke, and trust me that is not easy to shut up a good [number] of prisoners. He is one of us in the end, a former inmate. I think many who signed up did so because they trust Progzhin. They don’t trust the authorities, but they believe Prigozhin when he tells them that they will be let free.”

На Крымском мосту, возможно, проведена диверсия. Как сообщили российскому агентству РБК в Национальном антитеррористическом комитете в субботу, 8 октября, произошел подрыв грузового автомобиля, что привело к возгоранию семи топливных цистерн железнодорожного состава. Два автомобильных пролета моста частично обрушены.

В связи с происшествием главное следственное управление СКР возбудило уголовное дело.

Ранее агентству TACC в пресс-службе Крымской железной дороги пожар на мосту объяснили возгоранием топливной цистерны. “Произошло возгорание топливной цистерны в хвосте грузового поезда. Локомотив с частью вагонов выведен на станцию Керчь. Ведутся аварийные работы. Причины происшествия устанавливаются”, – говорится в сообщении.

“Крым, мост, начало. Все незаконное должно быть разрушено, все украденное – возвращено Украине, все российское оккупационное – изгнано”, – отреагировал на происшествие советник главы офиса президента Украины Михаил Подоляк.

Движение машин и пригородных поездов по мосту прекращено

По официальным информации, автомобильная часть моста “просела”, железнодорожная – повреждена. Автомобильное движение и пригородное железнодорожное сообщение между Крымом и Краснодарским краем по Крымскому мосту “приостановлено”.

Советник “главы” Крыма Олег Крючков утверждает, что “судоходные арки не повреждены”. “О причинах и последствиях говорить рано. Ведутся работы по тушению пожара”, – написал он в Telegram. Предварительно, пострадавших нет, уточнил Крючков.

В украинских Telegram-каналах распространяются многочисленные фотографии и видео пожара на мосту. На видео, в частности, можно заметить, что часть автодорожного моста провалилась.

Прорабатывается проект паромной переправы

Паромная переправа может быть запущена как альтернатива Крымскому мосту, поврежденному в результате пожара. Об этом агентству “Интерфакс-Юг” заявил “и.о. министра транспорта Крыма” Николай Лукашенко. “Движение через Крымский мост остановлено до выяснения обстоятельств, на месте работают специальные службы. Прорабатывается вопрос запуска паромной переправы”, – указал чиновник.

Президент России Владимир Путин поручил сформировать правительственную комиссию для выяснения причин произошедшего и ликвидации последствий, сообщил его пресс-секретарь Дмитрий Песков. По его словам, на место выехали главы МЧС и Минтранса Александр Куренков и Геннадий Савельев.

Всероссийский союз страховщиков оценил ущерб от взрыва в 200-500 млн рублей.

Крымский мост

Строительство 19-километрового транспортного перехода через Керченский пролив, соединяющего Керченский полуостров с аннексированным Крымом было начато в феврале 2016 года и стоило, по официальным данным, 227,92 млрд рублей. Переход состоит из двух параллельных мостов: автомобильного и железнодорожного. Официально открытие автомобильного моста состоялось 15 мая 2018 года, железнодорожного – 23 декабря 2019 года.

16 августа в интервью британской газете The Guardian советник главы Офиса президента Украины Михаил Подоляк заявил, что Киев рассматривает, как законную военную цель. “Это незаконное строительство и основные ворота для снабжения российской армии в Крыму. Такие объекты должны быть уничтожены”, – подчеркнул Подоляк. Он анонсировал “в ближайшие два-три месяца” новые атаки на объекты в Крыму.

Смотрите также:

On Monday, April 4, 2022, as I was checking photos to send to someone in response to an inquiry about one of my ebay listings, I found a photo of the cover of the book “Willie Mosconi on Pocket Billiards” among my photos. It had been posted there sometime in the past few days, and I didn’t post it. There was no reason I would. It wasn’t there the last time I was working with my photos; which was in the latter part of last week in conjunction with uploading ebay items for sale.

I used to play pool in my younger days because I enjoyed the competition, the challenge of improvement, and the socializing at a pool parlor in Bridgeport that drew persons from all social strata from the surrounding communities from business executives from Westport to street people. As the FBI in its extensive research on me for my investigations into crime and corruption throughout the legal system knows, I used to spend time in the pool parlor. Thus in accordance with the FBI’s pathology and demented mental condition, at times as part of its characteristic, ingrained semantics of terrorism, the FBI employs symbols, images, and objects relating to pool. The FBI knows I will notice these especially, and thus be made aware of the FBI’s ominous, malignant presence in my life. Such pool-related images, etc., exemplify how the FBI tailors its witness intimidation and threats to aspects of the lives, activities, interests, relationships, etc., of particular individuals. There have been incidents at estate sales and auctions, interactions with FBI people (agents and stooges), and online contacts where I have received images, etc. (similar to the photo of the cover of the Mosconi book) relating to pool employed to inform me that the FBI remains busy in its witness intimidation of me and terrorism of me including death threats.

As the misdemeanor case against me for trespass at the Pequot Library in June 2019 progresses at the courthouse G. A. 2 in Bridgeport, CT, and my accusations of fabrication of evidence, witness intimidation, bribery, false statements to police officers, defamation, and conspiracy and even manslaughter and cover-up of this become exposed in the course of my pro se defense against the trespass charge, the FBI is escalating its witness intimidation of me (as anyone who knows anything about the FBI would expect). The cover of the Mosconi book on pool is the latest instance of this. I expect to encounter others when I go out later today and as I do errands throughout the week. Among these will be individuals acting menacingly toward me or standing at a distance holding a cell phone as if taking photos of me or talking on a cell phone while looking at me.

I mention the Mosconi book cover photos appearing among my photos stored on my computer not because this is a particularly menacing incident of the sort I often encounter — though it is surely ominous and disturbing — but because it serves to illustrate the latest stage of the FBI’s practices of fabrication of evidence and infiltration into the lives of individuals it regards as undesirable (as reflected in my calling a disturbing targeting incident at the Pequot Library an instance of FBI “social cleansing”) to itself and individuals and organizations it associates with to destabilize and threaten such undesirables businesses and social activities and interfere with and manipulate computer networks with obvious implications for fabricating and planting evidence.

Experienced and perceptive as I am now after about a decade of FBI targeting of me originating out of FBI affinities with central players of the Democratic Party in Connecticut — including the Pullman and Comley law firm, a major contributor to the party — during the Malloy administration when the FBI was working with the Hillary Clinton Democratic campaign committee to sabotage the Trump presidential campaign and later the Trump administration and then-chief state’s attorney John Bailey (q. v., the case Dillon v. Bailey for a picture of joint FBI and Bailey criminal activity a respected Connecticut state trooper connected with the chief state’s attorney’s office called out), I am announcing that I am available as consultant or witness regarding FBI treacheries which I have identified and touched on in this social-media posting.

I detest the treacheries I have experienced and witnessed being continually perpetrated by the FBI not only for my own sake, but also for the sake of many other individuals in my area of Fairfield County the FBI has targeted and abused and for the wellbeing and continuance of democratic society. The FBI has not yet finally undermined and destroyed democratic society with its campaign to accomplish this out of perversions peculiar to it given its resources and illusions (e. g., its agents are “special”) and objective of establishing a preferential and formative (q. v., treacheries relating to Trump) position in the burgeoning administrative-security state. But it continues to work at this. The larger topic of most of my social-media posts is the way the FBI is morphing as it maintains its central ambition of determining the nature and central, formative practices of the society after being thwarted in its efforts to get Hillary Clinton elected president. END