How Ukraine Blew Up a Key Russian Bridge

[mahatmakanejeeves]

How Ukraine Blew Up a Key Russian Bridge

By James Glanz and Marco Hernandez Nov. 17, 2022

The attack severed a crucial Russian supply line and triggered a month of Russian airstrikes. Experts reconstructed how Ukraine pulled it off.

Last month, a truck laden with explosives drove across the Kerch bridge, a critical artery connecting Russia with its troops fighting in southern Ukraine. A train traveled alongside.

{snip}

[Tomconroy]

1. I read the article but it didn't make much sense to me.

The target was the railroad bridge, not the road bridge. Russia moves it's supplies mostly by rail. Not road.
So to do damage to the RR bridge they had to know that a train loaded with diesel fuel would be going by in the exact spot where the truck exploded.
The Times doesn't explain how that could have happened. The RR bridge is out at least until summer.
We'll just have to wait for Zelenskyy's book after the war is won.
Sometime next year.

[Emrys]

2. I don't think anyone is currently in a position to describe with certainty how the bridge was blown.

There's much about the official line - grabbed and run with suspiciously quickly by the Russian Federation - on events that day that doesn't add up. Open source intelligence analysts are divided about it. Only a relatively few people know for sure. Was it a truck bomb as they claim, and if so, was it planned by Ukraine and does that mean they've embraced suicide bombing or blew up an innocent driver? Were explosives planted under the bridge - possibly with a view to strategic detonation by the Russians if it proved necessary - and detonated opportunistically? Was it a waterborne strike? - Quite a few of us think we saw on the CCTV footage what looked like the prow of a Ukrainian maritime drone emerging into view between the bridge pillars at the precise moment of detonation. Was it a combination of methods?

A degree of uncertainty about how it was done is probably preferable at the moment, since Ukraine may decide to repeat the trick using similar methods.