с днём рождения, вова!
He deserves a big candle for his 70th.
That is some seriously effective propaganda
Also it appears that russians residing in Crimea are trying to make a break for it
https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1578651480256831488
https://twitter.com/alistaircoleman/status/1578651199233875969
https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1578605334062473216
Short thread:
https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1578695421224157184
Three people killed in bridge explosion, says Russia
Three people were killed after a truck bomb caused a fire and the collapse of a section of a bridge linking Russia with Crimea, Russian officials said.
Russia’s national anti-terrorism committee said the truck bomb set alight seven railway carriages carrying fuel, resulting in a “partial collapse of two sections of the bridge”.
A man and a woman who were riding in a vehicle across the bridge were killed by the explosion and their bodies were recovered, Russia’s investigative committee said. It did not provide details on the third victim.
Meanwhile, Russia’s defence ministry said Russian troops fighting in the Mykolaiv, Kryvyi Rih and Zaporizhzhia regions of southern Ukraine could receive all the supplies they needed via existing land and sea corridors.
Saturday’s explosion on the road-and-rail bridge, which has been used to take Russian personnal and military supplies through the peninsula into other parts of southern Ukraine, brought down sections of road taking traffic in one direction and also damaged railway tracks.
Ukraine hints that it sabotaged a crucial bridge linking Russia and Crimea to spite Putin on his 70th birthday
I will admit, it would have been a unique childhood experience to get a classroom visit from a masked fascist war criminal.
Some of those dolphins are moles.
I have always been suspicious of those crafty dolphins.
FT-
After a seven-month poorly run military campaign, Russia’s state media, pro-Kremlin lawmakers and other supporters of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine have ramped up their public criticism of the army and its leading figures. The open swipes spilling even from Russian officials such as Stremousov, rare even before the war, is even more remarkable now when a law on “discrediting the armed forces” carries a prison sentence of up to 15 years. That such criticism has gone unpunished indicates the Kremlin is tacitly approving it and is looking for a way out of an increasingly dire situation on the frontline, said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of political consultancy R. Politik. “We’re at the point where the elite is dealing with the question of how to win the war,” Stanovaya said. “Nobody’s casting any doubt on the war itself, but on how to win, what methods to use, which tactics, and which people are going to lead the campaign. The Kremlin has let the elite know the taboo on criticising the defence ministry and the troops has gone,” she added.
@GagHalfrunt i agree. My first thought was ammonia based on the video above but that’s a pretty dodgy way to do demolition. I saw a video from earlier where they were approaching from the other direction and walked right up to where the bridge collapsed and said it was the expansion joints. Which sounds much more targeted and to my uneducated guess a more realistic way to do it.
I’m very curious about why the Russia-bound lane was spared(especially given the risk that, at a definite cost in efficiency, it could be turned into a Ukraine-bound lane part of the time, or its two lanes divided).
Just a limit to how much payload the planners thought they could deliver, and by what means(potentially also why the railroad side didn’t get the same attention?); with destruction of both lanes or the entire bridge being the desired but infeasible scenario?
A deliberately limited demonstration of capability against the more troublesome half of the bridge intended to provide the motive, and preserve the means, for Russia-aligned portions of Crimea to run for the exit?
By the standards of very unauthorized demolition it looks very clean and precise; I’d just love to know whether that’s because someone was forced to be economical by how little they could slip through the defenses; or because someone was quite deliberately sparing part of the bridge.
I’ve seen a claim that the power supply to the overhead lines was cut, trapping the train on the bridge. In any case, the track has been damaged if not rendered unusable, by the fire from the burning oil tanker wagons.
ETA: The railway bridge is not electrified, but vandalising the signalling system would cause the signals would fail-safe to red, trapping the train on the bridge until the signallers realised what had happened and radioed the driver.
Brief thread:
I’m guessing that “Dear mister Wagner Man, if patriotic values are so important why do you work for a shadowy deniable mercenary band rather than serve in the armed forces?” is considered an incorrect ‘conversation about important things’ topic…
A truck bomb seems like the likeliest cause of the explosion after all (no visible damage to the underside of the road spans, but scorch marks, bent guard rails and other surface damage topside right where the truck was driving), so the answer to all your questions is probably “that was the only way available”.
There are fancy security checkpoints on the Crimean side, but not on the Russian side, so the truck with a bomb had to drive from Russia towards Crimea to avoid detection. It’s probably no coincidence that it exploded as it was driving past a train carrying cisterns of fuel. Presumably the hope was that the cisterns would cascade and amplify the damage, which worked only partly - the rail bridge is still standing and at least one side is already operational.
It also seems doubtful whether this was a suicide attack. In CCTV footage, the truck appears to be moving along at a steady speed straight down the road in the outermost lane, which doesn’t seem optimal if the driver was aiming to cause the most damage. So probably some poor trucker just unknowingly carried a remote-detonated charge, which also limited the precision of the attack.
