Two of the three bridges connecting Crimea to mainland Ukraine were hit by Ukrainian missiles on Sunday, August 6th.
Sergey Aksyonov, the Russian governor of the Republic of Crimea, said that both bridges, the Chonhar road bridge linking mainland Ukraine to the Crimean Peninsula and a smaller bridge linking the town of Henichesk in the Kherson region with the peninsula’s northeast coast, were temporarily closed to traffic, Russian news agency RIA reports.
The surface of the Chonhar road bridge was damaged, traffic diverted, and repairs had begun, he said. The governor added that Ukraine had fired 12 missiles, nine of which Russia’s air defense managed to take down, a claim which cannot be independently verified.
It is yet unclear whether the delivery of supplies to Russia’s military in southern Ukraine would be significantly affected.
According to Aksyonov, a school and a gas pipeline were damaged in the attack, leaving more than 20,000 residents of the Russia-annexed town of Henichesk without natural gas.
Acting governor of the Kherson Region, Vladimir Saldo, said that an Anglo-French Storm Shadow missile had been used in the strike on the Chonhar bridge. The bridge had been attacked before, on July 22nd and July 29th.
The strikes on the Crimean bridges follow Russia’s reprisal for last Friday’s attack on a Russian tanker. On Saturday night, Russia launched three waves, comprising at least 70 missiles and drones, from aircraft over the Caspian Sea, of which Ukraine failed to shoot down 10 cruise missiles and three hypersonic missiles, according to international news agencies. Six people were killed.
In a briefing, Defense Ministry Spokesman Lieutenant General Igor Konashenkov said that Russian Armed Forces had struck Ukrainian air bases near Starokonstantinov in the Khmelnitsky region and Dubno in the Rovno region “with precision weapons, hitting the designated targets.”
On Sunday, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine commented that “last night, dozens of Russian missiles and Shaheds [Iranian-made drones] searched for Ukrainian planes and Storm Shadow missiles at the airfields. But it wasn’t until today, in Chonhar and near Henichesk, that the Russians finally found them.”
