Two people are killed in an attack on a bridge in Crimea, which Russia blames on Ukraine

Two people were killed and a child was seriously injured in an attack on a bridge in Crimea, Russia’s main rail and road link to the peninsula it forcibly annexed in 2014.

Russia blamed Ukraine for the attack on Monday 17 July, while Kiev suggested that the incident could have been a provocation on the day of the agreement allowing grain exports across the Black Sea.

A few hours after the attack, on Monday 17 July, Russia announced that it was withdrawing from the agreement until further notice.

Traffic on the bridge linking Russia to Crimea was suspended after the attack due to an “emergency situation”, Russian regional governor Sergei Aksyonov said.

A spokeswoman for Ukraine’s Southern Military Command, Natalia Khumeniuk, assessed that “this could be a Russian provocation”.

After the attack on the bridge in Crimea, Mikhail Podolyak, an aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, posted on social media that “Russian instruments of mass murder are short-lived”.

“All illegal structures used to deliver Russian instruments of mass murder are necessarily short-lived – regardless of the reasons for their destruction”, he tweeted.

The BBC and AFP reported that Kiev’s navy and SBU security service carried out a “special operation” using maritime drones, citing unnamed Ukrainian security sources.

The SBU and the navy refused to say whether they were involved, although some Ukrainian officials have presented the bridge as a legitimate military target.

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Monday accused Ukraine of carrying out an attack on a bridge linking Russia and Crimea in which two people were killed, with the participation of the UK and the US.

Zaharova has not provided any evidence to support these claims.

“Today’s attack on the Crimean Bridge was carried out by the regime in Kiev,” Zakharova said on 17 July, Reuters reports.

She added that decisions “are made by Ukrainian officials and the military, with the direct participation of US and British intelligence agencies and politicians.”

Earlier, the speaker of the Crimean parliament, Volodymyr Konstatinov, who was appointed to the post by Moscow, described the “state of emergency” on the Crimean bridge as a “terrorist attack by the Kiev regime”, according to Russia’s regime-run RIA news agency.

He assessed that Ukraine had committed a “new crime” by targeting what he called a “civilian object”.

Russian officials had earlier announced that two people had died after what they called an “emergency situation” on a bridge linking the occupied Crimea peninsula to Russia.

According to unconfirmed reports, explosions were heard early on Monday morning.

The Kersk bridge was opened in 2018 and allows road and rail travel between Russia and Crimea, a Ukrainian territory occupied by Moscow’s forces since 2014.

It was partially closed last October after a powerful explosion.

The bridge, which is an important thoroughfare, was fully reopened in February.

The head of the Russian administration in Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, wrote on Telegram that “traffic on the Crimean Bridge is stopped. An emergency situation has occurred in the area of the 145th support on [the Russian side of the bridge].”

“Measures are being taken to restore the situation. I ask residents and guests of the peninsula to refrain from travelling on the Crimean Bridge and, for security reasons, to choose an alternative land route through the new regions.”

This is what Russia calls the Ukrainian territories it occupied last year – Kherson, Zaporizhzhya, Lugansk and Donetsk – and claims to have annexed.

The Russian transport ministry said that the explosion did not damage the bridge’s girders and only the roadway was affected./RSE/