The Guardian: Ukraine's intelligence service plans to destroy Crimean bridge

The Defence Intelligence of Ukraine intends to make a third attempt to destroy the Crimean Bridge, a nearly 19-kilometre-long structure that connects Russia with annexed Crimea, in 2024.

Source. This was reported on Wednesday, 3 April, by the British newspaper The Guardian, citing high-ranking officials of the Ukrainian intelligence service.

The GUR believes that it will be able to disable the bridge in the near future.

"We will do it in the first half of 2024," the British newspaper quoted one of the DIU representatives as saying.

He added that the head of the GRU, Kirill Budanov, already has "most of the means to accomplish this task".

The newspaper notes that the attack on the bridge is part of a plan approved by Vladimir Zelensky to "minimise" Russia's presence in the Black Sea.

Over the past five months, Ukraine has sunk seven landing boats and large ships belonging to the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the newspaper notes. The last of these, the patrol ship Sergei Kotov, was destroyed on 5 March in an attack involving 10 Ukrainian Magura V5 maritime drones packed with explosives.

Representatives of the GUR, cited by The Guardian, said that this was a preparatory operation before another attack on the bridge.

However, the British newspaper expressed doubt that the GRU could conduct a special operation against such a well-protected target. Russia has taken significant measures to protect the bridge, beefing up its air defences and deploying a "target barge" as a decoy for guided missiles, The Guardian writes.

For Kyiv, the bridge is a symbol of Russia's illegal annexation. "Its destruction will strengthen Ukraine's campaign to liberate Crimea and boost morale on the battlefield, where Ukrainian troops are gradually retreating," the journalists note.

Since Russia's attack on Ukraine, the Crimean bridge has been attacked twice. The first time was on 8 October 2022, which damaged the railway track and destroyed several spans of the motorway. The second explosion occurred on 17 July 2023, when the bridge was attacked by a naval drone. As a result, one of the road spans was destroyed and the other was damaged.

Background. Earlier, SBU Head Vasyl Malyuk said that Ukraine has the potential to destroy the Crimean bridge, but that Russians are not currently transporting weapons across it.