Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Ukrainian secret services on Sunday of causing the powerful explosion that partially destroyed Crimea’s strategic bridge the day before and described the incident as a “terrorist act”.
After the explosion on the bridge connecting Russia to the peninsula, annexed in 2014, Moscow carried out night bombings in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, killing at least 12 people.
“The perpetrators, the executors and the sponsors are the Ukrainian secret services,” Putin accused, referring to the bridge explosion, during a meeting with the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, according to a video released by the Kremlin.
“There is no doubt that this is a terrorist act to destroy Russian civilian infrastructure that is of great importance,” Putin added in his first reaction after the incident.
The Kremlin announced that the Russian president had convened the Security Council for a meeting on Monday. Earlier, Russian authorities had blamed the explosion on a truck bomb owned by a resident of the Krasnodar region in southern Russia.
The Ukrainian army and Kiev’s special services (SBU) have neither confirmed nor denied their involvement in the action, and President Volodymyr Zelensky only scoffed in a video about Saturday’s “cloudy” weather in Crimea – a likely allusion to the smoke from the explosion.
Kiev, however, has repeatedly threatened to hit this bridge symbol of the annexation of Crimea, which is also used to supply Russian troops in Ukraine.
“Absolute Evil”
In the other hand, Zelensky called the Russian military “terrorists” after the attacks on residential buildings in Zaporizhzhia (south), which killed between 12 and 17 people, according to different estimates.
Zaporizhzhia has suffered several attacks in recent weeks. On Thursday, seven Russian missiles hit the center of the city and left 17 dead.
“Meaningless. Absolute evil. Terrorists and savages. From the one who gave this order to the one who carried it out. Everyone has a responsibility. Before the law and before the people,” wrote the Ukrainian president on his Telegram account.
The Russian attack “destroyed apartments where people lived, slept without attacking anyone,” Zelensky added.
The Ukrainian Air Force said four cruise missiles, two missiles fired from fighter jets and other anti-aircraft missiles were used against the city.
The Russian army declared that it carried out attacks with “high precision weapons” against units of “foreign mercenaries” near Zaporizhzhia.
The city of Zaporizhzhia is located in the homonymous region where the nuclear plant taken by the Russians is located and which has been threatened by the continuous fighting around it.
The plant, the largest in Europe, lost its last external source of electricity due to the attacks and had to work with emergency generators until Sunday, when it was reconnected to the grid, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said.
“Our team in Zaporizhzhia confirms that the external power line lost yesterday [Saturday] has been restored and that [the plant] is reconnected to the grid, a temporary relief from a still unstable situation,” announced IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi , this Sunday via Twitter.
Zaporizhzhia is also one of four areas whose annexation was announced last week by the Russian president.
Three dead
In Crimea, security footage posted on social media showed a strong explosion as several vehicles circulated on the bridge.
Other images show a caravan of tank cars on fire on the railway part of the bridge, and parts of one of the two highway tracks collapsed.
Train and car traffic was disrupted for several hours.
According to investigators, the explosion left three dead: the driver of the truck that caused the explosion and two other people, a man and a woman, who were driving a vehicle close to the explosion.
The Russian army, which has suffered several military setbacks and is struggling on the Kherson front in southern Ukraine, said on Saturday that troop supplies were not threatened.
Since the beginning of September, Russian forces have been forced to retreat on several fronts. In particular, they had to withdraw from the Kharkiv region (northeast) and retreat into Kherson.
Faced with a galvanized Ukrainian army, reinforced by Western weapons supplies, Putin ordered in late September the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of reservists and the annexation of four Ukrainian regions, although Moscow only partially controls them.
In a sign of discontent at the highest levels with the conduct of the operations, Moscow on Saturday named a new head of its “special military operation” in Ukraine, General Sergei Surovikin, 55.