Putin takes first train across Crimea bridge

MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin on Monday stood in the driver’s cabin of a train for the official opening of a railway bridge that links annexed Crimea to southern Russia.

During his ride starting in Kerch in Crimea in a shortened threecarriage train, Putin also spent time drinking tea with engineers on the 227-billion-rouble ($3.6 billion) project.

The rail bridge, which Putin praised as “magnificent,” is 19 kilometres long. The bridge for car traffic opened in May last year when the president drove a truck across it.

The total rail route from the northwestern city of Saint Petersburg to the Crimean port city of Sevastopol covers a distance of 2,500 kilometres. Putin said the bridge would restore rail links to Crimea severed in 2014 when Moscow annexed the peninsula, sparking an ongoing separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine that has claimed some 13,000 lives.

The company of Putin’s close ally, billionaire businessman Arkady Rotenberg, won the construction contract for the bridge.

He sold the company last month.

KEY STAGE Putin told workers an anecdote about receiving an emotional call from “your main boss with the simple Russian surname Rotenberg,” after the completion of a key stage of the project.

“He called me at night and spoke in such a voice that I asked him ‘Have you been drinking?’” said the strongman.

The coverage of the project has been reminiscent of Soviet infrastructure projects, with a newsreader on state-controlled Rossiya 24 television channel calling the opening “without exaggeration historic.”