Ukrainians may target bridge to mainland Russia
A UKRAINIAN general has threatened to use Western weapons to blow up a bridge linking mainland Russian with Crimea.
Maj Gen Dmytro Marchenko, who has been leading the defence of the Mykolaiv region in the south of Ukraine since the war began, told the Krym.realii website on Wednesday that Kyiv considers the 227m Kerch Strait Bridge a legitimate target.
“This will be our number one target,” he said when asked what Ukraine would do with the new advanced weapons it has been seeking from the West.
“We have to tear this umbilical cord to cut off [Russian] reinforcements As soon as it’s done, [Russians] will panic.”
Many Western leaders have been wary of sending long-range artillery to Ukraine, fearing that Kyiv could launch retaliatory strikes against Russia, which could potentially spark an even bigger conflict.
US officials earlier this month announced a major shipment of multiple-launch rocket systems, saying Kyiv had given assurances that it will not use those weapons against targets in Russia.
Russia has been using the £2.7bn bridge it built over the Strait of Kerch after its 2014 annexation of Crimea to bring in troops and weaponry to the Black Sea peninsula that served as a staging ground for the invasion of Ukraine’s south in the first week of the war.
Vladimir Konstantinov, the parliament speaker in Russia-occupied Crimea, yesterday dismissed the Ukrainian general’s statement as a “a threat of Nazis to destroy all around them”.
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, on Thursday insisted that the bridge is fully safe for passenger transport and is guarded by the Russian military’s “preventive measures”. However, in response Ukraine’s military intelligence agency yesterday released what appear to be full blueprints of the bridge in what might constitute a breach. The Ukrainian government has been clamouring for more substantial weapons supplies as its officials said Russians currently have 10 times the artillery in the battlefield in eastern Ukraine.
Separately, Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, admitted that Kyiv could eventually use new weapons to reclaim Russiaoccupied territory, including Crimea. “Crimea is a strategic objective for Ukraine because it’s Ukrainian territory,” he told CNN. “But we will move step by step.”