New demolition of the Crimean Bridge

What's happened

On the night of July 16-17, the second attack on the Crimean Bridge occurred during the war. As a result , one span of the bridge collapsed in the area of ​​the 145th support, another one came off the support, and two people also died .

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The governor of the annexed peninsula, Sergei Aksenov, reported the attack at 4:21 (Moscow time) and called the incident an “emergency.” According to the Gray Zone telegram channel associated with the Wagner PMC, not one, but two strikes were made on the bridge at 03:04 and 03:20.

The attack on the Crimean Bridge was a special operation of the SBU, reports RBC-Ukraine. The publication, citing sources, writes that the bridge was attacked by surface drones. The BBC reports the same with reference to sources in the SBU. “The bridge was attacked using surface drones. It was difficult to reach the bridge, but in the end we managed to do it,” a source in the SBU told the publication. At the same time, the speaker of the Operational Command “South” of Ukraine, Natalya Gumenyuk, called the explosion on the Crimean Bridge a provocation of the Russian authorities.

After the explosion , car and ferry traffic was stopped . Drivers who were traveling to the peninsula are turned back towards the Krasnodar Territory and asked to go to Crimea through the occupied territories.

Two people are known to have died - a married couple from the Belgorod region. The family was traveling by car with the child. The girl remained alive. She has moderate injuries.

The authorities of occupied Crimea believe that repairing the bridge will take about a month . “All bridge structures are on supports. One of the threads sagged a little, but only slightly,” an interlocutor close to the authorities of annexed Crimea assessed the damage to the Crimean bridge in a conversation with Vorstka. According to his assessment, “repair work will not take very long,” presumably a month or a little more.

The previous attack on the Crimean Bridge took place on October 8. The consequences were much more significant. Then the explosion collapsed about 250 meters of the highway, burned seven tanks of a freight train and killed five people. The BBC Russian Service wrote that in 2022 more than 2 billion rubles were spent on protecting the bridge. It took almost two months to repair the car part.

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