Ukrainians Fear Russian Reprisals for Crimea Bridge Attack

With some prominent Russians calling for fierce reprisals after an explosion crippled Russia’s sole bridge to Crimea, the Kremlin on Sunday launched a barrage of rockets at Ukrainian civilian areas, sending a deadly reminder that for all its battlefield losses, Moscow can still inflict mass misery.

Many had been bracing for a severe Russian response to Saturday’s attack on the Kerch Strait Bridge, which analysts described as a significant blow to Moscow, if more symbolic than practical. The blast damaged a span that holds personal importance for President Vladimir V. Putin, and is crucial for resupplying Russian forces as they defend against an intensifying Ukrainian counteroffensive along the southern front.

Though Russian officials made a show of reopening the bridge to some automobile and train traffic, the extent of the damage, as well as the timeline for Moscow to resume the transport of much-needed military equipment and ammunition, remains unclear. Even so, a senior Ukrainian military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of a government prohibition on discussing the attack, graded the success of the attack as “excellent.”

“The operation showed the failure of the Russian system to guarantee the security even of the most significant and sacred targets,” the official said. “The bridge is an artificial umbilical cord that connects the thief to his stolen property. All that is unnatural and obtained illegally must be and will be destroyed.”

Mr. Putin, in his first comments about the explosion, did not hesitate to point a finger at Ukraine on Sunday. “There is no doubt that this is a terrorist attack aimed at destroying the critically important civilian infrastructure of the Russian Federation,” he said.

According to Russia, the truck exploded as a train pulling seven fuel tanks was passing on a parallel rail, setting them afire. If that timing was deliberate, it would suggest either luck or a fair degree of sophistication to the operation.

A day after the explosion, details about how it was carried out remained spotty.

Though Ukrainian officials made no secret of their glee, the government in Kyiv had yet to publicly take responsibility for the attack. Another senior Ukrainian official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that Ukraine’s intelligence services were behind the bombing, and said that explosives had been loaded onto a truck that was driven onto the bridge and detonated. The official did not, however, know what happened to the driver of the truck or whether the driver had even known about the bomb.

A Russian news outlet, Baza, published a video interview of a young man from Krasnodar, in southern Russia, who claimed to have owned the truck. In the video, the man said that his uncle had been the one who was driving at the time of the explosion, and denied knowing anything about a bomb.

“I have nothing to do with what happened on the Crimean bridge,” the man said.

It was not possible to confirm that veracity of the video.

The attack on the bridge left hundreds of trucks stranded as Russian officials tried to figure out how to get them to and from Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.

Eighteen trains carrying a total of around 6,000 passengers had crossed the bridge since traffic resumed, the state-run Russian news outlet RIA Novosti reported, quoting the railroad service. But the Crimean authorities were still working on establishing stable transportation links, including ferries, between the peninsula and Russia, Sergei Aksyonov, the Kremlin-installed leader of Crimea said on his Telegram channel.

Mr. Aksyonov said that cars would be able to use the bridge, but that for the time being, trucks, buses and all heavy-duty vehicles would have to cross using a ferry service that would be provided free.

That left trucks backing up on both sides, according to Russian press reports, with around 250 waiting to get off Crimea as of Sunday. On the other side, more than 170 trucks were waiting to cross from Russia into Crimea, the state-run news agency Tass reported.

A first ferry carrying about 16 trucks departed on Sunday, they said. Ferries operated across the Kerch Strait long before the bridge opened in 2018.

The speedy resumption of auto and rail traffic indicated that while the explosion might have created temporary logistical hurdles, it did not appear to have done permanent damage to the bridge — or to Russia’s war effort, analysts said.

“The collapsed lane of the road bridge will restrict Russian military movements until it is repaired, forcing some Russian forces to rely on the ferry connection for some time,” the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington group that tracks the conflict, wrote in a report on Saturday. “Russian forces will likely still be able to transport heavy military equipment via the railroad.”

Experts who reviewed video of the explosion and the damage it caused said it appeared to involve a powerful bomb. When demolition crews dismantle bridges, they often use specialized explosive charges to attack load-bearing points in the structure, allowing the weight of the bridge to tear itself apart. But the blast caught on video may have simply come from a large amount of bulk explosives, and still managed to bring down sections of the bridge.

“An open-air explosion like this, in a sense it has to be a bigger bomb to do the same damage,” said Donald O. Dusenberry, a consulting engineer who has investigated many bridge failures and studies damage caused by explosions.

Nick Glumac, an engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the ignition of the train cars passing by when the bomb went off also testified to its strength.

But in the end, the structure was still standing.

“Bridges are very tough targets to bring down,” Mr. Glumac said.

In Russia, calls for revenge against Ukraine were swift, with some suggesting that without a brutal response Moscow would be considered weak.

Evgeny Poddubny, a war correspondent for the state RT outlet, said that nobody in the Ukrainian leadership seemed to fear Russia anymore.

“The enemy has stopped being afraid, and this circumstance needs to be corrected promptly,” he wrote in RT’s Telegram channel. “Commanders of formations, heads of intelligence agencies, politicians of the Kyiv criminal regime sleep peacefully, wake up without a headache and in a good mood, without a sense of inevitability of punishment for crimes committed.”

Aleksandr Kots, a war correspondent for the Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, wrote on Telegram that the bridge attack boded ill for Moscow’s already troubled efforts to hold onto territory in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine, and most likely foreshadowed a future attack on Crimea itself.

He described the “consistency” that Ukraine was showing in the war as “enviable” and called for Russia to “hammer Ukraine into the 18th century, without meaningless reflection on how this will affect the civilian population.”

The potential for reprisal attacks darkened the celebratory atmosphere in Ukraine in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Kerch Strait Bridge. In Kyiv on Sun​​day, those going about their errands reflected on the unease they now felt about what might happen next.

“Everyone is anxious, I think,” said Volodymyr Stelmakh, 50.

The attack, he said, has only raised the alarm for Ukrainians, particularly those in Russian-occupied areas, that something worse could come.

“I don’t think it will happen right away,” said Veacheslav Tuceac, 32, who was born in Moldova and moved to Ukraine a few years ago with his wife. But the bridge attack, he fears, might be “the start of a chain of events.”

It was impossible to say whether the attacks on civilian neighborhoods in southern Ukraine on Sunday were revenge for the bombing or part of a regular campaign of terror that the Kremlin has waged against Ukrainian cities in the absence of battlefield success.

The brunt of the attacks was born by Zaporizhzhia, the regional capital of a southern Ukrainian province that is one of four Mr. Putin claims to have annexed last month. By Russia’s own logic, that would mean that Russian forces were launching attacks aimed on Mr. Putin’s own subjects.

Overnight, several missiles hit homes and destroyed part of an apartment building, Anatolii Kurtiev, the acting mayor, wrote on Telegram. He said that five residences were destroyed and another 40 were damaged.

Photos in Ukrainian news outlets showed piles of rubble and a partially collapsed building illuminated by fires burning around it. Video taken at the scene of the strike after daybreak Sunday showed dozens of emergency workers and volunteers digging through the rubble looking for survivors.

Oleksandr Starukh, governor of the Zaporizhzhia region, said in a Telegram post on Sunday morning that there might still be people trapped in the rubble in the city, which Russian forces have targeted relentlessly in recent days.

The strikes were just the latest in weeks of assaults on civilians that have shaken Zaporizhzhia and other Ukrainian cities. Zaporizhzhia, a large regional center on the Dnipro River, has also been a major humanitarian hub for residents of smaller towns and cities who have fled intense fighting closer to home.

The death toll from one Russian missile attack on Thursday in Zaporizhzhia has grown to 20 people, Mr. Starukh said Sunday.