Crimea Bridge: Putin accuses Ukraine of 'terrorism'

 Crimea Bridge: Putin accuses Ukraine of 'terrorism'

Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused Ukraine of attacking a bridge over Russia-linked Crimea, saying it was an "act of terrorism".

President Putin said Ukraine's intelligence forces are aiming to destroy a significant part of Russia's civilian infrastructure.

He was speaking at a meeting with the head of Russia's investigative committee, Alexander Bastrykin.

Officials say three people were killed in the explosion on the bridge.

• Excitement and fear in Ukraine after the bridge explosion

Russian officials say the victims were in a nearby car when a lorry exploded.

"No doubt, this is an act of terrorism aimed at destroying Russia's critical civilian infrastructure," Mr Putin said.

Its authors, perpetrators and beneficiaries are the Security Services of Ukraine.

Mr Bastrykin said citizens of Russia and some foreign states had assisted in preparing the attack.

According to Mr Bastrykin, investigators have established that the truck they say traveled through Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, North Ossetia and the Krasnodar Territory.

He has ordered a probe into the incident, which led to some parts of the road falling down.

Ukrainian officials have not indicated that their military was behind the attack.

But an adviser to Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolik, denied Mr Putin's allegations.

He wrote that "there is only one terrorist state" and that "the whole world knows who it is".

"Does Putin accuse Ukraine of terrorism? It sounds too cynical to Russia," he said.

On Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged the incident in his nightly address, saying: "Today was not a bad day and the territory of our state was mostly sunny."

"Unfortunately, it was cloudy in Crimea. Although it was also hot," he said.

Russian authorities partially reopened the road portion of the bridge a few hours after the attack but only for light traffic.

The railway section of the bridge - where the oil tankers caught fire - has also been reopened.

The 19 km (12-mile) bridge, the longest in Europe, is an important supply route for Russian forces fighting in Ukraine.

Russia has used the bridge to move military equipment, ammunition and personnel from Russia to battlefields in southern Ukraine.

It was opened by Mr Putin in 2018, four years after Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Security camera footage released on social media showed a truck - reportedly from the Russian city of Krasnodar, an hour's drive from the crossing - was moving west across the bridge at the time of the explosion.

The footage shows a huge fireball just behind the truck - and to one side - as it begins to climb a higher section of the bridge.

The speed at which the truck bomb theory began to spread in Russian circles was questionable. This suggested that the Kremlin preferred an act of terrorism to a more dangerous possibility: that it was an audacious act of sabotage committed by Ukraine.

“I have seen a lot of large vehicle-borne IEDs [Improvised Explosive Devices] in my time,” a former explosives specialist in the British Army told me. "It doesn't look the same."

A more plausible explanation, he said, is a large explosion under the bridge - perhaps delivered using some sort of covert maritime drone.

"Bridges are typically designed to resist a downward load on deck and a certain amount of load from the wind," he said. "They are generally not engineered to resist upward loads. I think this fact was exploited in the Ukrainian attack."

Some observers have noted that in another security camera video, something resembling the bow wave of a small boat is seen next to a bridge support, split a second before the explosion.