The 11-mile-long bridge is the most important overland line of communication between Russia and Russia’s forces in southern Ukraine. There are ways around the bridge, but they’re narrow, slow and vulnerable to Ukrainian attack.
Two days after a powerful explosion rocked the $4-billion rail and road bridge across the Kerch Strait, the narrow waterway separating the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula from the Russian mainland, the Russians are scrambling to re-open the span.
It’s not hard to see why. The 11-mile-long bridge is the most important overland line of communication between Russia and Russia’s forces in southern Ukraine. There are ways around the bridge, but they’re narrow, slow and vulnerable to Ukrainian attack.
Which leaves Russia with a choice. Fix the Kerch Bridge fast, or risk its brigades on the southern front—already weakened by months of bombardment—starving on the brittle vine of Russia’s collapsing supply lines.
The Russian government began work on the Kerch Bridge just a year after its forces annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. The bridge, along with sea and air transport, helped the Russians to build up a powerful garrison in Crimea. A garrison that, back in late February, rolled north as part of Russia’s ever-widening war on Ukraine.
The bridge with its twin rail lines and two lanes for cars and trucks by far is the most efficient way for heavy equipment and bulk materials to get to Crimea and then north to the occupied Kherson, the locus of Russian control over southern Ukraine south of the free city of Mykolaiv.
The bridge’s extreme value explains why Ukraine apparently devised some method of striking it from a distance of 175 miles. None of the rockets and ballistic missiles Ukraine has copped to possessing can travel that far.
