It was unclear if the driver of the truck, who died in the blast, was aware there were explosives inside. In video captured by a surveillance camera on the bridge, a huge fireball is seen, seeming to consume several vehicles. A small sedan and a tractor-trailer truck driving side by side appear at the epicenter of the blast. The explosion caused two sections of the bridge to partly collapse.
For the Ukrainians, the explosion “is not necessarily a decisive victory, but the balance of war often turns on an accumulation of lesser victories,” said Ben Barry, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a research group based in London. “It is another ratchet of the pressure on President Putin.”
While there were no official claims of responsibility, Ukrainian officials, who in the past have said the bridge would be a legitimate target for a strike, indicated that the explosion was no accident and made no secret of their satisfaction.
“Crimea, the bridge, the beginning,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, wrote in a Twitter post on Saturday. “Everything illegal, must be destroyed. Everything stolen returned to Ukraine. All Russian occupiers expelled.”
Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, the Security Service of Ukraine, known by its Ukrainian acronym S.B.U., issued a statement rephrasing a stanza of a poem by Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko. “Dawn, the bridge is burning beautifully,” the agency posted on Twitter. “A nightingale in Crimea meets the S.B.U.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine seemed to allude to the attack when he noted in his nightly address that Saturday “was a good and mostly sunny day” in Ukrainian territory. “Unfortunately, it was cloudy in Crimea,” he said.
