Key events
As mentioned in the previous post, Ukraine’s post office actually issued a commemorative stamp last year to celebrate the October attack on the Crimea bridge.
It illustrates how hated the bridge is by Ukrainians as a symbol of Russia’s illegal occupation of the Crimean peninsula.
Designed by the Ukrainian artist Yuriy Shapoval, the stamp shows the bridge behind clouds of dark grey smoke.
In the forefront is the famous scene from the Titanic, where Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet stand on the bow of the ship a reference to Russia’s claims that the bridge was unsinkable.
The bridge was hit by a huge explosion back in October, causing a section of the road bridge to collapse into the Kerch strait and leaving a train and the rail link in flames.
Russia said three people were killed in the blast and blamed it on a truck bomb. Kyiv did not claim responsibility for the attack, although it was certainly celebrated by Ukrainians.
The country’s post office revealed – within hours – designs for a commemorative stamp, showing the bridge ablaze and raising questions about whether the explosion had been anticipated.
More on the significance of the Crimea bridge, also known as the Kerch bridge or Kerch Strait bridge, from George Barros, an analyst at the US-based Institute for the Study of War:
The Kerch Strait Bridge is a logistically significant object.
Russia will only have 1 ground supply line – the costal highway on the Sea of Azov – to sustain (or evacuate) its tens of thousands of troops in occupied Kherson & Crimea if UKR manages to degrade/destroy the bridge. pic.twitter.com/f2Uaj6XE5u
— George Barros (@georgewbarros) July 17, 2023
Crimea has stockpiles of fuel, food and industrial goods, the Russian news agency Tass has reported, citing Elena Elekchyan, acting minister of industrial policy in Crimea.
A ferry service linking Crimea with Kuban, in the Russian region of Krasnodar, has also been halted, Tass reported.
While we try to find out more about the latest “emergency” on the Crimean bridge here is background on why it’s so important, courtesy of Reuters:
The 19-km (12-mile) Crimea Bridge over the Kerch Strait is the only direct link between the transport network of Russia and the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
The bridge was a flagship project for [Russian president Vladimir] Putin, who opened it himself for road traffic with great fanfare by driving a truck across in 2018.
It consists of a separate roadway and railway, both supported by concrete stilts, which give way to a wider span held by steel arches at the point where ships pass between the Black Sea and the smaller Azov Sea.
The structure was built, at a reported cost of $3.6 billion, by a firm belonging to Arkady Rotenberg, a close ally and former judo partner of Putin.
The bridge is crucial for the supply of fuel, food and other products to Crimea, where the port of Sevastopol is the historic home base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
It also became a major supply route for Russian forces after Moscow invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, sending forces from Crimea to seize most of southern Ukraine’s Kherson region and some of the adjoining Zaporizhzhia province.
Google maps is showing huge tail backs on the Russian side of the bridge:
Russia’s Grey Zone channel, a heavily followed Telegram channel affiliated with the Wagner mercenary group, according to Reuters, reported that there had been two strikes on the bridge at 03:04 a.m. (0004 GMT) and 03:20 a.m.
Reuters and the Guardian are not able to verify this report.
Meanwhile, in a further Telegram post, Crimean governor Aksyonov has asked residents to “refrain from travelling through the Crimean bridge” and to choose alternative land routes “for security reasons”.
Opening summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine with me, Helen Livingstone.
Traffic has been stopped on the Crimean bridge, which links the Crimean peninsula with the Russian region of Krasnodar, due to an “emergency”, the Russia-installed governor Sergei Aksyonov has said.
Writing on the Telegram messaging app in the early hours of Monday, Aksyonov said “measures are being taken to restore the situation” but gave few further details.
The RBC-Ukraine news agency reported that explosions were heard on the bridge, according to Reuters which said it was not able to independently verify the reports.
The bridge, one of president Vladimir Putin’s prestige projects and a vital logistical link for the Russian military, was hit by an explosion in October.
In other developments:
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Fighting in eastern Ukraine has “somewhat intensified” as Ukrainian and Russian forces clash in at least three areas, Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar said. Russian forces had been attacking in the direction of Kupiansk in Kharkiv for two successive days, she said: “We are on the defensive,” Maliar wrote. “There are fierce battles.” Maliar also said the two armies were pummelling one another around the ruined city of Bakhmut but that Ukrainian forces were “gradually moving forward” along its southern flank.
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Russian president Vladimir Putin said the Ukrainian counteroffensive had been a failure in an interview broadcast on television. “All enemy attempts to break through our defences … they have not succeeded since the offensive began. The enemy is not successful,” Putin said.
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The president also said Russia had a “sufficient stockpile” of cluster bombs and that Moscow reserved the right to use them if such munitions were used against Russian forces in Ukraine. He added that Russia had not yet used the weapons although Russia was accused of using cluster munitions in last year’s deadly Kramatorsk railway station attack.
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The Russian state has taken control of French yoghurt maker Danone’s Russian subsidiary along with beer company Carlsberg’s stake in a local brewer, according to a decree signed by Putin. Danone said it was investigating the situation while Carlsberg said it had not been officially informed of the move.
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The UN-brokered deal under which Moscow allowed Ukraine to ship its grain across the Black Sea is due to expire late Monday. The Kremlin has threatened to pull out of the agreement and said at the weekend it still had concerns that obligations to remove “obstacles to the export of Russian food and fertilisers still remain unfulfilled”.
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Two people were killed on Sunday when Russia launched a series of missile and shelling attacks on the city and region of Kharkiv, beginning in the early hours of the morning and continuing into the evening. Kharkiv governor Oleh Synyehubov said a young man was killed in the city’s Osnovianskyi district and another civilian man was killed in a village in the Kupiansk area.
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Ukrainian forces shelled the Russian town of Shebekino near the Ukrainian border with Grad missiles on Sunday, killing a woman riding her bike, the governor of Russia’s Belgorod region said. Vyacheslav Gladkov said the missiles had struck a market area, damaging a building and two cars.
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Only a “few hundred” fighters from Russia’s Wagner group have so far relocated to Belarus, a Ukrainian official said, leaving the eventual fate of the fighting force unclear. “There are some groups of mercenaries on the territory of Belarus, but we are not talking about any massive or large-scale deployment … we are talking about a few hundred,” Andrii Demchenko, the spokesperson for Ukraine’s border guards, told Ukrainian television.
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A Chinese naval flotilla set off on Sunday to join Russian naval and air forces in the Sea of Japan in an exercise aimed at “safeguarding the security of strategic waterways”, according to China’s defence ministry. Codenamed “Northern/Interaction-2023”, the drill marks enhanced military cooperation between China and Russia since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and is taking place as Beijing continues to rebuff US calls to resume military communication.
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Former UK prime minister Tony Blair said it would be “completely disastrous” if the US rowed back support for Ukraine in the event of Donald Trump being re-elected as US president. He also told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme that said Ukraine had done an “extraordinary” job in defending itself but when asked what the endgame looked like he said the path would be “extremely difficult”.