MOSCOW: A fire sparked by a car bomb has broken out on a key road and rail bridge linking Crimea to Russia, which annexed the territory from Ukraine in 2014, Moscow authorities said Saturday.
“Today at 6:07 a.m. (0307 GMT) on the road traffic side of the Crimean bridge … a car bomb exploded, setting fire to seven oil tankers being carried by rail to Crimea,” Russian news agencies cited the national anti-terrorism committee as saying.
The bridge, which was built on the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin and inaugurated in 2018, was a key transport link for carrying military equipment to Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine, especially in the south, as well as ferrying troops there.
Russia had maintained the bridge was safe despite the fighting in Ukraine but had threatened Kyiv with reprisals if it was attacked.
RIA-Novosti and the Tass news agency quoted local Russian official Oleg Kryuchkov as saying an object thought to be a fuel storage tank caught fire and that traffic has been stopped on the bridge.
Images shared on social media purported to show fire and damage to the span. The authenticity of the reports and images couldn’t be immediately verified.
The crossing is a pair of road and rail bridges that Russia built after it seized and annexed Crimea from Ukraine in violation of international law in 2014.
The fire occurred hours after explosions rocked the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv early Saturday, sending towering plumes of smoke into the sky and triggering a series of secondary explosions.
Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said on Telegram that the early-morning explosions were the result of missile strikes in the center of the city. He said that the blasts sparked fires at one of the city’s medical institutions and a nonresidential building. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The blasts came hours after Russia concentrated attacks in its increasingly troubled invasion of Ukraine on areas it illegally annexed, while the death toll from earlier missile strikes on apartment buildings in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia rose to 14.
On Friday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to human rights organizations in his Russia and Ukraine, and to an activist jailed in Belarus, an ally of Moscow.
Berit Reiss-Andersen, the committee’s chair, said the honor went to “three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence,” though it was widely seen as a rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his conduct of Europe’s worst armed conflict since World War II.
Putin this week illegally claimed four regions of Ukraine as Russian territory, including the Zaporizhzhia region that is home to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, whose reactors were shut down last month.