Bridges are a battlefield where wars are won and lost. Ukraine is just the latest example

In the business of battle, the military has never cared much for bridges. They are difficult to destroy, hard to defend, tough to build or replace, and lots of men tend to die on or near them. But “bridging” is essential to the military — and it has been one of the defining features of the war in Ukraine.

This eight-month war straddles the centuries. It’s an air and space war as much as a ground war Field Marshal Douglas Haig would have understood.

While Elon Musk’s 3,000 Starlink satellites have proved critical in Kyiv’s successes, so too has the ability to master basics: the final stages of most battles are often decided by relatively small, violent contests between frightened men. But the bulk of any victory is almost always down to the logistics that set up those vicious little engagements — and, almost always, bridges.

Ukraine is a big country with lots of water for any military force to negotiate. Trans-European rivers such as the Danube, the Dniester and the Siverskyi Donets run through it. And the mighty Dnipro describes a great arc from north to south that divides the country into an eastern third and a western two thirds that — largely because of the Dnipro — have different historical roots. Ukraine is a food super-producer partly because there are deltas, tributaries and low-lying wetlands everywhere.

Intending to manoeuvre swiftly across vast swathes of Ukrainian territory in the early stages of their invasion, Russian commanders assumed huge risks in their ability to control key bridges and crossing points. Their armoured columns were slow in approaching Kyiv during the first days of the war partly because of their failure to capture enough bridges intact before the Ukrainians blew them up.

The Russians built a long pontoon bridge over the Pripyat on the Belarusian side of the border before the invasion began, but, with so many local bridges down, then ran into severe problems getting their equipment over marshy ground on the other side of the river. They knew the geography they faced and had exercised their own bridging equipment in Belarus before the invasion began, even bringing three commercial bridging companies to the pre-war manoeuvres.

But exercising and real combat are different worlds. And in any war, bridges over key waterways are battlefields waiting to happen. In September 1944, the Allied operation at Arnhem was a classic of its kind: an audacious attempt by airborne troops to seize nine bridges and crossings from the Dutch border all the way to Arnhem and then hold the Arnhem bridge long enough for ground forces to reach it and cross the Rhine and on into Germany.

The heroic failure at Arnhem was always more than just “a bridge too far”.

It was strategically misconceived, too hastily arranged and — most crucially for those left stranded on the north side of the Arnhem bridge — logistically deficient in almost every way.

The first bridge that got Allied troops across the Rhine wasn’t taken until the following March, at Remagen. The Wehrmacht’s demolition charges failed and the Ludendorff Bridge remained damaged but intact. Soldiers of the US 9th Armored Division seized it under fire and created a bridgehead on the northern side. A ferocious 18-day battle ensued. German commanders used every weapon they could summon to destroy the Remagen crossing, from frogmen to V2 rockets.

After ten days of fighting all around it, the bridge at Remagen finally collapsed. By then, however, three more pontoon bridges had been laid at the crossing and 25,000 Allied troops had made it to the bridgehead on the other side. And that’s the point: the objective is not so much about any given bridge, but the skill of army engineers in the various tasks of bridging. It’s all logistics.

Ukraine has magnified some of these old truths. Even when they are open, bridges and crossings are dangerous places for the military; they slow forces down, creating bottlenecks, congestion and easy targets. Gone are the days when air attacks or artillery barrages would have to be quite lucky to score enough direct hits to “drop a bridge”. Modern precision weapons, such as the western Himars the Ukrainians are using so effectively — long-range, multiple rockets with great accuracy — can pepper any bridge and play havoc with the forces, or the tonnes of ammunition and supplies, waiting to go over it.

More than in most conflicts, this war of the bridges has become a vital sub-plot to the main battle narrative unfolding in Ukraine. Russian forces spent 100 days trying to occupy Severodonetsk, making a disastrous attempt to cross the Siverskyi Donets river further north to encircle the city. But their pontoon bridging was sluggish and the crowd of men and vehicles waiting to get across provided a deadly killing zone for Ukrainian artillery and air power.

In time-honoured Red Army fashion, the Russians tried again, twice more, in the same place, with the same tactics and the same result. They lost a whole battalion group’s worth of tanks and men. Russian forces then had some success, creating another viable crossing to the south of Severodonetsk and, for once, then advancing quickly to create an encirclement.

Ukrainian forces were dependent on the four main bridges connecting the city to Lysychansk on the western side of the Siverskyi Donets. Russian artillery had already attacked all the bridges. But it was Russian engineers opening up the southern crossing that gave their forces the advantage. Ukrainian troops had to withdraw from good defensive positions on the Lysychansk side of the river or risk being completely surrounded.

That was a small victory in the wider war of the bridges that the Russians have since been losing. During Kyiv’s surprise offensive through Kharkiv during September, they were unable to stop the Ukrainians crossing the Oskil River at several points, and have been pushed eastwards away from it.

Losing the natural defensive protection of the river, Russian forces are now struggling to hold a line along the P-66 highway between Svatove and Kreminna.

More significantly, long before they launched their much heralded counter-offensive against the cities of Kherson and Nova Kakhovka, Ukrainian forces spent weeks attacking key bridges in the Kherson region to hamper Russian supplies and logistics. The main M-14 Antonovsky Bridge across the wide Dnipro River, connecting Kherson on the west bank with Oleshky opposite, has been a particular target — a long, raised, motorway bridge and rail connection that provides the city’s biggest supply artery from the east.

Ukrainian attacks have not destroyed the bridge — they will hope to use it themselves at some stage — but they have inflicted enough damage to make road and rail passage impossible. So it forces the Russians to build a long pontoon bridge beside it. And Ukrainian rockets attack that too — as well as the ferries the Russian have been using and the lines of vehicles waiting for the ferry. Like Remagen, the battle flows back and forth to contest the crossing point, not just the bridge.

The same is true further north in the Kherson region, where Ukrainian attacking forces crossed the meandering Inhulets River in several places and established some hard-won bridgeheads for the push south to Nova Kakhovka that will support troops approaching Kherson city from the west. The pattern has become regular. Russian artillery destroys Ukrainian pontoon bridges; Ukrainian engineers rebuild them; Russia attacks them again.

Unlike A Bridge Too Far or The Bridge at Remagen, this isn’t Hollywood. The reality is a more mundane triangular battle of attrition between engineers to build bridges, artillery and missile attacks to destroy them, and anti-missile and anti-aircraft defences to protect them for as many days as possible. It’s three-dimensional logistical chess, played out over brief and unpredictable periods as the front line ebbs and flows. For now, the Ukrainians are winning the war of the bridges.

But some bridges carry as much political weight as the military tonnages they bear. The Crimean Bridge, linking annexed Crimea to Russia across the 12 miles of the Kerch Strait, was President Putin’s pride and joy — opened by him in 2018 and lauded as the “construction of the century”. It was put out of action by an explosion three weeks ago. Kyiv did not claim direct responsibility, but Putin had no doubts and immediately unleashed a new air campaign against Ukrainian civilians and critical infrastructure.

The Russian president’s vengeful rage against Ukrainian society is one thing. But of greater concern to his commanders is likely to be the disruption the damaged bridge causes to military supplies — particularly fuel — going steadily west towards the battle in Kherson. The damage will evidently take some time to make good.

In the best traditions of bridge warfare, another attack on the reconstruction efforts, if it were possible, would be even more debilitating to Russia’s defensive battles across the mighty Dnipro River many miles away in Kherson.