Fruitcake Vlad’s melon surprise
VLADIMIR Putin received stacks of melons piled up in pyramids for his 70th birthday.
The gift from Tajikistan’s president was one of several from the Russian tyrant’s toadies and fellow dictators.
They also included a tractor from Belarusia’s Alexander Lukashenko.
Tractors have been the pride of Belarusian industry and thuggish Lukashenko, who has ruled
Belarus since 1994, told reporters he used the same model in his own garden.
Also sending his best wishes was grovelling Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, a Kremlin puppet.
He fawned: “Today, our national leader, one of the most influential and outstanding personalities of our time, the number one patriot in the world… turns 70 years old…”
VLADIMIR Putin was handed a birthday present he won’t forget – after a huge explosion wrecked his Crimean Bridge.
It sent part of the 12-mile road and rail link crumbling into the Black Sea.
The £3.2billion bridge – one of the world’s longest – is the main route between Russia and Crimea and a key supply artery for Moscow’s troops.
Russia blamed a truck bomb and said the blast killed three people and set fire to seven oil tankers on a train.
The Kremlin called it a terror attack and warned “consequences will be imminent” if Ukraine was responsible.
It triggered scenes of jubilation in Ukraine although Kyiv did not directly claim responsibility.
One expert described it as a “punch in the face for Putin” a day after his 70th birthday.
The head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, Oleksiy Danilov, posted footage of the burning bridge on social media alongside a video of Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy birthday, Mr President”.
Yesterday morning’s inferno happened despite state-of-the-art explosive checks on all vehicles driving across.
Images online show the truck suspected of causing the explosion being searched before being sent on its way. Other pictures posted by Russia show one carriageway blown away, and the other still attached but cracked.
Also called the Kerch Bridge, the massive structure was built by Putin in 2018 to reinforce his claim to Crimea, which he seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Since the start of the war in February, Ukrainian officials have made regular allusions to their desire to destroy the symbol of Russian power.
Yesterday an adviser to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, wrote: “Crimea, the bridge, the beginning.
“Everything illegal must be destroyed, everything stolen must be returned to Ukraine, everything occupied by Russia must be expelled.”
Ukraine’s Monobank released a new debit card featuring the collapsed crossing. And the postal service is to issue seven million postal stamps featuring the remains of the bridge.
Kremlin spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Kyiv’s reaction to the destruction of civilian infrastructure “testifies to its terrorist nature”.
Gennady Zyuganov, head of the Russian Communist Party, said the “terror attack” was a wake-up call.
No timescale has been set for the bridge to reopen. Russia’s Defence Ministry claimed its forces in southern Ukraine could be fully supplied through existing land and sea routes.
But Mykola Bielieskov, of the Ukrainian Institute of Strategic Studies, said severing the bridge would cause “the whole Russian southern front to crumble quickly”.
The blast comes amid warnings Putin could resort to tactical nuclear weapons to win the war after a series of embarrassing defeats.
Former British army colonel and weapons expert Hamish de Bretton Gordon said Ukraine could even retake Crimea.
He said: “The conventional Russian military is now so degraded that NATO could wrap it up in a few days.
“US and UK plus NATO must make Putin fully aware that if he uses nuclear or chemical or biological weapons he is finished.
“Putin hoped to go down in history as the modern Peter the Great but looks likely to go down as the president who lost everything.”
The bridge was blown hours after Russian missiles reportedly blitzed Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, Europe’s biggest, is now said to be reliant on emergency diesel generators after losing its last remaining external power source. The International Atomic Energy Agency said the plant’s link to a 750-kilovolt line was cut at around 1am on Saturday.
All six reactors at the heavily shelled plant are inactive down but they still need power for cooling and safety functions.
‘CONSEQUENCES’: Zelensky