Russia-Ukraine WarExplosion on 12-Mile Crimea Bridge Kills 3

Blast on sole bridge linking Crimea with Russia deals blow to Moscow’s war effort.

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A large explosion hit the Kerch Strait Bridge on Saturday. The bridge links the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula to Russia, and is a primary supply route for Russian troops fighting in the south of Ukraine.CreditCredit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

KYIV, Ukraine — A fireball consumed two sections of the only bridge linking the occupied Crimean Peninsula to Russia on Saturday, disrupting the most important supply line for Russian troops fighting in southern Ukraine and dealing an embarrassing blow to the Kremlin, which is facing continued losses on the battlefield and mounting criticism at home.

The blast and fire sent part of the 12-mile Kerch Strait bridge tumbling into the sea and killed at least three people, according to Russian authorities, who said a Ukrainian truck bomb had caused the blast.

The Ukrainian government, which applauded the damage, did not publicly take responsibility for the explosion. One senior Ukrainian official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of a ban on officials discussing the matter, said that Ukraine’s intelligence services had orchestrated the attack and that it involved a bomb loaded onto a truck that drove across the bridge.

It was unclear if the driver of the truck, who appeared to have 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. A small sedan and a tractor-trailer truck driving side by side appear at the epicenter of the blast.

For President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who presided over the bridge’s opening in 2018, the explosion was a highly personal affront, underscoring his difficulties in the face of continued Ukrainian successes.

Where the Bridge Was Damaged

UKRAINE

3,000 ft

AZOV

SEA

CRIMEA

KERCH

STRAIT

RUSSIA

Sevastapol

Kerch Strait

Bridge

◀ Crimea

Tuzla Island

Area of

explosion

Crimea

Krasnodar, Russia ▶

Four-lane

roadway

Outer two lanes

collapsed here.

Two

railroad

tracks

Several tanker cars

of a train could be

seen burning here.

100 ft

UKRAINE

Kherson

AZOV

SEA

CRIMEA

RUSSIA

Sevastapol

Kerch Strait

Bridge

3,000 ft

KERCH

STRAIT

◀ Crimea

Tuzla

Island

Area of

explosion

Krasnodar, Russia ▶

Four-lane

roadway

Outer two lanes

collapsed here.

Two

railroad

tracks

Several tanker cars

of a train could be

seen burning here.

100 ft

Source: Damage locations are based on photographs, video and satellite imagery.

By Marco Hernandez; satellite images by Google from March 2020.

The full extent of the damage was not immediately clear. The bridge has spans for train and automobile traffic.

By Saturday evening, the railroad section of the bridge had undergone repairs and a train with 15 cars had successfully crossed the span, according to a Russian state news agency, Tass. Car traffic had also resumed on the undamaged side of the bridge, the head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, said in a post on Telegram.

Even so, Russian officials and hard-line military bloggers were already calling for revenge, with one member of Crimea’s Parliament warning that anything less than an “extremely harsh” response would show weakness.

The explosion is emblematic of a Russian military in disarray. Russian forces were unable to protect the bridge, despite its centrality to the Russian war effort, its personal importance to Mr. Putin and its potent symbolism as the literal connection between Russia and Crimea.

Any serious impediment to traffic on the bridge could have a profound effect on Russia’s ability to wage war in southern Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces have been fighting an increasingly effective counteroffensive.

The bridge is the primary military supply route linking Russia with the Crimean Peninsula. Without it, analysts said, the Russian military will be severely limited in its ability to bring fuel, equipment and ammunition to Russian units fighting in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, two of the four Ukrainian provinces that Mr. Putin announced Russia had annexed on Sept. 30.

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A handout satellite image made available by Maxar Technologies shows smoke and a collapsed part of the Kerch Strait bridge in Crimea.Credit.../EPA, via Shutterstock

Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee said in a statement that a truck had exploded on the automobile side of the bridge, igniting seven fuel cisterns being pulled by a train on a parallel crossing headed in the direction of Crimea. The explosion caused two sections of the bridge to partly collapse.

While there was no official claim of responsibility, Russian and Ukrainian officials indicated that the explosion was no accident, and top Ukrainian officials, who in the past have said the bridge would be a legitimate target for a Ukrainian strike, 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.”

The president, Volodymyr Zelensky, 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.

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.”

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, and Megan Specia from Kyiv, Ukraine.

Crimea’s Kerch Strait Bridge holds deep strategic, and symbolic, value.

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The Kerch Strait Bridge in Crimea, in 2019.Credit...Aleksey Nikolskyi/Sputnik, via Reuters

The 12-mile Kerch Strait Bridge links the Crimean Peninsula to Russia and is not just a primary supply route for Moscow’s forces fighting in southern Ukraine. It is also deeply symbolic for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a pillar of his disputed claim to the Crimean Peninsula since the completion of the twin road spans in 2018.

Mr. Putin presided over the bridge’s opening, personally driving a truck across what is a physical link between Russia and Crimea — land that Mr. Putin seized from Ukraine in 2014 and annexed to international outcry.

On Monday, a predawn assault on the bridge forced the Russian authorities to temporarily close the crossing. The full extent of the damage was unclear, but Russian officials said two people were killed in the attack and blamed Ukraine for the incident. Ukrainian officials offered no comment. But they have previously said that the structure, made up of a pair of road and railway bridges, is a legitimate target because of its vital logistical role in the Kremlin’s war effort.

The assault came a little more than nine months after an Oct. 8 attack on the bridge by an explosives-laden truck forced the closure of one lane of traffic and damaged the railroad tracks. Three people died in that attack. The damage was so severe that the vehicular crossing did not reopen until February. Normal railroad traffic resumed in May.

After the October attack, Moscow stepped up countermeasures to defend the structure, deploying a target ship — replete with an array of radar reflectors — to protect the bridge from attack and running drills to cover the bridge with a smoke screen.

Ukrainians loathe the bridge, whose symbolism and strategic importance for resupply has long made it a potential target.

After illegally annexing Crimea in 2014, Moscow vowed to physically connect the peninsula to Russia.

For a century, talks of building a bridge across the strait — which runs between two mountain ranges, creating a fierce wind tunnel — had failed to result in action. But Mr. Putin put his weight behind the project, despite that and other engineering challenges, which include a seabed covered with some 250 feet of fine silt deposited by the alluvial flow from various rivers.

In 2018, when the new bridge was opened, Mr. Putin hailed it as a “remarkable” achievement that, he said, referring to a major city on the peninsula, “makes Crimea and legendary Sevastopol even stronger, and all of us are even closer to each other.”

But after explosions at the Saki airfield in Crimea in August last year, the bridge served a different purpose: It was a quick escape route for civilians as the war came to the peninsula, with more than 38,000 cars crossing into Russia in one day, the most recorded since Mr. Putin declared it open.

A correction was made on 
Oct. 11, 2022

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to a bridge to Crimea that was toppled during World War II. The bridge was planned by Germany, but it was not a “German military bridge.”

How we handle corrections

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The damage to the bridge in Crimea hinders Russia’s military logistics.

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A helicopter drops water to extinguish the blaze on the Kerch Strait Bridge in Crimea on Saturday. Credit...Reuters

KRYVYI RIH, Ukraine — In a war fought on the expanse of steppe in southern and eastern Ukraine, victory or defeat is in large part decided by the logistics of moving men, weaponry, ammunition, fuel and food over vast distances — all of which could become more difficult for the Russian army after the partial destruction of the Kerch Strait Bridge.

The 12-mile span, part of which now slumps into the Black Sea, had been a linchpin of Russian military logistics for a sprawling land war. The bridge is important for tying Russia with the Crimean Peninsula; the peninsula, in turn, had been used as a staging area for attacks elsewhere in Ukraine.

Since early summer, Ukraine has focused its strikes on supply lines, with the Kerch Strait Bridge marking a cherished prize for a military force that for months has been publicly hinting at its plans to hit the span.

Russia has alternatives for transporting troops to staging areas where they can be reorganized into battle-ready units, but they are more costly, dangerous and time-consuming, Ukrainian and Western analysts and former military officials say. Other options include sailing ships to harbors in Crimea and sending trains and trucks on railroads and roads in other occupied areas of Ukraine.

“The biggest issue is not supplying, the biggest issue is staging,” Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister, said in a telephone interview. “They were getting them ready for the battlefield safely in Crimea, forming battlefield units in Crimea and sending them to the frontline.”

With the bridge partly destroyed, Russia can use roads from the Ukrainian border that wind through the occupied towns of Mariupol and Berdyansk, hugging the coast of the Azov Sea, that weave in and out of range for Ukrainian rocket artillery. Troops would have to form battle-ready units inside Russia and travel longer distances in these formations, a less efficient means of supplying the front lines, Mr. Zagorodnyuk said.

By Saturday evening, rail service had been at least partly restored, and a train with 15 cars had successfully crossed the span, according to a Russian state news agency, Tass. On the undamaged side of the bridge, car traffic had resumed, the head of Crimea, Sergey Aksenov, said in a post on Telegram.

Those coastal routes are closer to Ukrainian positions than Crimea is and so are more vulnerable to attack. As if reinforcing these difficulties, Ukraine on Saturday struck a cargo train with rockets in Ilovaisk, a city in the occupied portion of Donetsk region, Petro Andrushenko, an adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, said.

“The occupiers now have big problems with supplies from both sides,” from the south in Crimea and from the east via the land borders with Russia, he said.

Railroads, the means of military logistics so preferred by the Russian army that it has whole units dedicated to rail travel, called Railroad Forces, do not connect all areas occupied by the Russians in southeastern Ukraine.

The explosion on the Kerch Strait Bridge will affect Russia’s ability to resupply and reinforce units in the southern provinces of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, Rob Lee, a Russian military specialist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, said in an email. Mr. Lee said it was unclear if the Russian military had enough ferries to cross the Kerch Strait to offset the disruption of rail and road traffic.

Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said Russian logistics would shift toward a rail line to the city of Melitopol, far closer to Ukrainian front lines than Crimea.

The route, he said, is “vulnerable to disruption” by Ukraine’s army. Hindering Russian resupply efforts would particularly benefit Ukrainian towns near the front line, which have been repeatedly shelled, Oleksandr Vilkul, the military governor of Kryvyi Rih, said in an interview.

“The occupiers managed all supplies for the south over the Crimean bridge,” he said. “Any difficulties for them in these logistics is naturally positive for us.”

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Frankfurt.

Russia names a new commander for the war in Ukraine.

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Gen. Sergei Surovikin in 2017.Credit...Pavel Golovkin/Associated Press

Russia’s Defense Ministry on Saturday appointed a general with a reputation for ruthlessness and long experience fighting in complex wars to command its forces in Ukraine, where repeated setbacks have provoked highly unusual public criticism of the military as incompetent.

Gen. Sergei Surovikin, 55, who was already the commanding officer of Southern Military District and whose troops have been facing a fierce Ukrainian counteroffensive, will lead what Russia still calls its “special military operation,” the ministry said in a statement.

Although the general has specialized in infantry for much of his career, he also has commanded the Russian air force. He led the Russian forces that intervened in Syria starting in 2015, and American commanders sometimes consulted directly with him there to avoid clashes.

In Ukraine, Russian forces have been especially plagued by an inability to coordinate the infantry, artillery and air force, as Ukraine has gone on the offensive in recent weeks.

“Surovikin knows how to fight with bombers and missiles — that’s what he does,” Gen. Kyrylo O. Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, said in June.

He has long had a reputation for corruption and brutality, military analysts said.

“He is known as a pretty ruthless commander who is short with subordinates and is known for his temper,” said Michael Kofman, the director of Russia studies at C.N.A., a defense research institute based in Virginia.

As a practical matter, General Surovikin was believed to be already commanding the Russian troops in Ukraine, even if he had not been officially named to the position, Mr. Kofman said. It was unclear whether the announced change, buried among other items in the official press release, would make much difference on the ground. Just last month, the Defense Ministry had made a rare announcement of a high-level leadership shake-up after an embarrassing rout of its forces in northeast Ukraine.

The Eastern Military District was also getting a new commander, Lt. Gen. Rustam Muradov, who had previously led Russian troops in the occupied Donbas region of Ukraine, according to a social media post by a senior official as well as the state register. The Ministry of Defense had not yet confirmed that change on Saturday.

Even with the personnel changes, it would be difficult for any one officer to make a difference given the structural problems plaguing the Russian military, analysts said.

“That is not going to solve all their problems,” said Frederick B. Hodges, a former top U.S. Army commander in Europe. “All the problems are institutional, deeply rooted flaws — corruption, lack of readiness.”

In a potential sign that the appointment was made to appease some of the right-wing hawks close to President Vladimir V. Putin who have openly criticized the military, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group which was deployed heavily in Syria, made a rare public endorsement of the general, calling him “legendary.”

“Surovikin is the most competent commander in the Russian army,” Mr. Prigozhin said in a statement quoted by the Live 24 news agency.

Before Ukraine, General Surovikin had served in a variety of roles, and he was considered as a possible next chief of the general staff, the head of the entire armed forces.

He was in Chechnya in the early 2000s and led Russian forces in Syria, according to his biography on the Defense Ministry’s website and state media. Human Rights Watch said in 2020 that he was among military leaders who might bear “command responsibility” for human rights violations in Syria.

General Surovikin spent at least six months in prison after soldiers under his command killed three protesters in Moscow during a failed coup in August 1991, but was eventually released without trial, according to a paper from the Jamestown Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. In 1995, he also received a suspended sentence for illegal arms trade, the paper said, adding that the conviction was later overturned.

“In the army, Surovikin has a reputation for total ruthlessness,” the paper added.

He was placed on a European Union sanctions list on Feb. 23, a day before Russia invaded Ukraine.

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Four missiles strike Kharkiv in one of the most intense barrages in weeks.

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Workers cleaned up debris after a piece of a shot-down missile fell into a park opposite its primary target, in central Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Saturday.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

KHARKIV, Ukraine — Four Russian missiles struck the city center of Kharkiv just after midnight on Saturday morning in one of the most intense attacks in weeks, targeting two building complexes used by the Ukrainian military.

One 45-year-old man was hospitalized with shrapnel wounds, the head of the Kharkiv regional military administration, Oleh Syniehubov, said on Telegram.

Three of the missiles landed in building courtyards, and a fourth landed in a park across the street. One missile landed on the grounds of the city library, an elegant pale yellow stucco building also used by the Institute of Agriculture, where Ukrainian soldiers had been using an annex in recent months.

On Saturday, uniformed soldiers examined a crater beside a mangled green bus. Two of the missiles had struck another building complex adjacent to the library, severely damaging part of a three-story building and nearby shops. Soldiers in civilian clothes barred entrance to the courtyard of the complex as police officials arrived to inspect the damage. The building seems to have been an ammunition depot, according to residents who posted videos of the aftermath of the strikes on social media.

A security guard who lived nearby said he heard explosions for about an hour after the strikes. Videos posted on Telegram channels by city residents captured flames burning and sounds of explosions.

On the yard of the second complex, one missile had gouged a crater almost 10 meters wide. People were carrying green boxes out of a building in another part of the yard. The buildings were also hit in a series of strikes in the summer.

The missiles were from S-300 air defense systems, a police investigator at the scene said, as he collected debris from the crater in the park.

The Russian army has used S-300 missiles increasingly in the past few months to attack both military and civilian targets across Ukraine, which has mounted a concerted counteroffensive against Russian positions in eastern and southern fronts.

Oleksandr Chubko and Borys Shelahurov contributed reporting.

Ukraine’s Nobel Peace Prize winners urge solidarity among rights defenders.

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Oleksandra Matviychuk, center, the chairwoman of the Center for Civil Liberties, and managers of the organization at press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Saturday.Credit...Efrem Lukatsky/Associated Press

KYIV, Ukraine — The leaders of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, which won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, rejected criticism of the committee’s decision to award it the prize alongside human rights defenders from Russia and Belarus, saying that the prize recognized the universal struggle against oppression.

Oleksandra Matviychuk, the chairwoman of the center, stressed during a news conference on Saturday that the Nobel Peace Prize belongs to every Ukrainian fighting for freedom and democracy, addressing a backlash from some Ukrainians over the sharing of the prize.

But Ms. Matviychuk also urged solidarity with those groups who have been fearlessly documenting human rights abuses in Belarus and Russia.

She said people who had criticized the lumping of the three organizations together should see that they all are working to fight as one for universal freedoms.

“It is a story about resistance to common evil and that human rights defenders in different countries are building links to solve problems that do not have state borders,” Ms. Matviychuk said, mentioning the slogan “for our freedom and yours” that many post-Soviet nations had used during their struggles for independence.

The phrase, she said, “once again has become relevant and will lead to the destruction of the renewed Russian empire.” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, she added, is not afraid of NATO — he is “afraid of ideas of liberty.”

Her organization received the peace prize alongside Memorial, a Russian human rights group, and Ales Bialiatski, an imprisoned human rights defender in Belarus.

Memorial was outlawed by the Kremlin last year. And Mr. Bialiatski, the Belarusian activist, was arrested last year as part of a sweeping and brutal crackdown on dissent in Belarus after the protests against President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko.

When human rights are threatened anywhere, they are threatened everywhere, Oleksandra Romantsova, the executive director of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, said during the news conference on Saturday.

“The lack of respect for human rights leads to war sooner or later,” she said. “Lukashenko and Putin, and all those who commit war crimes and crimes against humanity, must be punished.”

The White House congratulated all of the winners of the prize in a statement on Friday, saying, “the brave souls who do this work have pursued the truth and documented for the world the political repression of their fellow citizens — speaking out, standing up, and staying the course while being threatened by those who seek their silence.”

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‘Happy birthday, Mr. President’: Ukrainians celebrate the bridge blast with memes.

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A couple took a selfie in front of an artwork shaped as a big stamp named “Cotton to the Crimean Bridge.Credit...Sergei Supinsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

KYIV — Nearly every significant military gain for Ukrainian interests in the war with Russia has been met with jubilation from Ukrainians and their supporters, who flood social media with celebratory memes.

The blast on Saturday morning that damaged the vital Kerch Strait Bridge that links the Crimean Peninsula to Russia was no exception.

The bridge has both practical and symbolic resonance as it is not only a critical supply line for Russian forces in the country’s south but also a personal passion project for President Vladimir V. Putin.

Within hours of the explosion, several government agencies in Ukraine had posted some sort of meme or joke on social media to celebrate it, to poke fun at Mr. Putin or to hint at who might have been behind it.

Among them was Ukraine’s national rail service, which posted a photo on Twitter of the Kerch Strait Bridge’s rail line engulfed in flames. “No smoking onboard the trains!” the service tweeted, accompanying the message with a winking emoji.

Dozens of photoshopped images depicted President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine grilling kebabs over the flames shooting from the bridge. Others reveled in the moment by positioning “Game of Thrones” characters alongside pictures of the damage or by suggesting that traditional Russian birch bark sandals could be used as flippers for swimming across the Kerch Strait.

Ukraine’s postal service quickly came up with a mock stamp depicting the bridge in a scene from the movie “Titanic.” One Ukrainian bank — Monobank — offered a new image for their virtual mobile bank cards that showed the destroyed surface of the Crimean bridge and the burning train. By midday, it had been downloaded more than 300,000 times.

Oleksiy Danilov, head of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, posted footage of the destruction alongside a video of Marilyn Monroe singing, “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” alluding to Mr. Putin’s birthday a day earlier.

The post was liked and shared tens of thousands of times.

The social media glee harked back to other pivotal moments since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February — including when the Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, was destroyed.

That ship had been a major target of Ukrainian ire after it bombarded Snake Island, a Ukrainian territory in the Black Sea, at the start of the war. When the Moskva was sunk, a popular joke among foes of the Kremlin was that the vessel had been turned into a submarine.

Messages on social media have often provided a rallying point for Ukrainians since the Russian invasion, with tens of thousands of images pouring out on Telegram channels and in other forums.

Memes have also been part of a major fund-raising effort for the Ukrainian side, reinforcing and commodifying the public image of a plucky nation that has managed to counter an invasion by a superpower.

Maria Varenikova and Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting.

The Crimea bridge explosion prompts calls for revenge from Russian hard-liners.

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Symbols in support of the Russian armed forces involved in the war in Ukraine were seen with the Kerch Bridge in the background in Crimea on Saturday.Credit...Reuters

Russian hard-liners reacted with surprise and frustration to the calamitous explosion on the Kerch Strait Bridge on Saturday, calling yet again for Russia to escalate its attacks on Ukraine.

President Vladimir V. Putin has faced heightened pressure in recent weeks with harsh criticism of military leaders from some of his closest, hawkish allies, and the explosion on the bridge was likely to add to accusations of incompetency swirling around the Kremlin’s entire Ukraine war effort.

Ukrainian officials have hinted that Ukraine was responsible for Saturday’s explosion.

Aleksandr Kots, a war correspondent for the Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, wrote on Telegram that disabling the bridge bodes ill for Moscow’s already troubled efforts to hold onto territory in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine — and likely foreshadowed a future attack on Crimea itself.

He described the “consistency” that Ukraine was showing in the war as “enviable” and called for Russia to “hammer Ukraine into the 18th century, without meaningless reflection on how this will affect the civilian population.”

Many commentators demanded that Russia destroy Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure and the transportation systems used to import Western armaments.

Another war correspondent, Evgeny Poddubny, writing for the state RT outlet, said that nobody in the Ukrainian leadership seemed to fear Russia anymore.

“The enemy has stopped being afraid, and this circumstance needs to be corrected promptly,” he wrote in RT’s Telegram channel. “Commanders of formations, heads of intelligence agencies, politicians of the Kyiv criminal regime sleep peacefully, wake up without a headache and in a good mood, without a sense of inevitability of punishment for crimes committed.”

Russia should also revive Mr. Putin’s formula for winning the Chechen war more than two decades ago when he vowed to pursue adversaries relentlessly — and even “waste them in the outhouse,” the post said.

At least at first, the attack did not incite more of the intense criticism focused in recent weeks on the Defense Ministry and the minister himself, Sergei K. Shoigu.

But the $7 billion, 12-mile-long bridge was a symbolic and engineering triumph for Mr. Putin. Completed in 2018, it literally cemented Russia’s claim to make Crimea part of its territory. Damaging it, as some commentators noted, raised questions about that control — which will most likely force the president to respond in some way.

The official government reaction was to label the explosion on the bridge a “terrorist attack” and to open an official inquiry.

Rybar, a Telegram news and commentary channel with nearly one million followers but whose origins are unclear, urged against criticism of the leadership in response to the blast, saying that such outpourings had been doing “more harm than good.”

The outlet did echo the calls, however, for Russia to destroy Ukraine’s infrastructure.

“We will not say how inaction in this situation will turn out,” Rybar said. “Let’s ask the question: If this is not a reason for really decisive measures, then what is it at all? People demand revenge.”

Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.

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Russian missile attacks in eastern and southern Ukraine kill 21 people.

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Smoke rising after explosions in Kharkiv early Saturday.Credit...Francisco Seco/Associated Press

Missile strikes have killed 21 people in the east and south of Ukraine over the last 24 hours, a senior official said on Saturday. The series of explosions shook towns and cities even as Ukraine made gains taking back its territory from Russian control.

The strikes killed 15 people in Donetsk Province in eastern Ukraine, four in Zaporizhzhia Province in the south and one in Sumy Province in the northeast of the country, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, a senior aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky, said on the Telegram messaging app. Mr. Tymoshenko said more than 20 other people had also been wounded.

In Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, the second largest city in the country, photos showed a red fireball lighting up the night sky, enveloped by a billowing cloud of dark smoke. Buildings, including a medical institution, were on fire, Kharkiv’s mayor, Igor Terekhov, wrote on Telegram. Mr. Tymoshenko said that six people had been injured there.

Missile strikes in cities and towns across southern Ukraine, including Zaporizhzhia, Nikopol and Berislav along the Dnipro River, have hit residential areas and turned apartment blocks to rubble.

The bombardments come as Moscow’s troops have been forced to retreat in parts of the country and appear to show the Russian military’s effort to use its advantage in long-range munitions to exact costs for its losses, according to Ukrainian officials and some military analysts.

But while the strikes have caused civilian deaths and damage to property, businesses and infrastructure, they appear to have done little to reverse Moscow’s territorial losses.

By contrast, Ukrainian have in recent months have largely used artillery supplied by the West to pinpoint Russian military infrastructure to impede Moscow’s capacity to resupply its forces.

Mr. Zelensky used a speech on Saturday to appeal to the West for fresh weapons, using the attacks as a rationale.

“We see what kind of war Russia can make literally out of nothing,” he said. “Russia can block the sea for a country it wants to capture. It can burn cities and villages. It can arrange missile terror.”

Russian shelling has again forced the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant offline, Ukrainian officials say.

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The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, on the Dnipro River, has been occupied by Russian forces since early March.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

KYIV, Ukraine — Russian shelling in the early hours of Saturday morning damaged the last line connecting the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant to Ukrainian energy systems, according to Ukrainian energy officials, cutting the facility off from the power grid that is used to cool its reactors.

The plant has been disconnected from external power at least twice before, forcing it to rely on diesel generators to power safety equipment. The availability of fuel to power the generators has long been a concern.

Herman Galushchenko, Ukraine’s energy minister, said in a Facebook post on Saturday that there was only enough diesel fuel to operate the plant for about 10 days, adding that the professionalism of Ukrainian nuclear workers was now the only “safeguard against a possible nuclear accident.”

Energoatom, the company that operates the plant, in a statement shortly after midnight said that the power line was damaged “due to another shelling by Russian troops.” The statement said that it is “necessary to repair and restore the operation of the communication lines of the ZNPP with the power system,” but did not say how long that is expected to take.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense blamed Ukrainian forces for the shelling, saying in a statement on Telegram that Ukrainian rockets had hit near the industrial zone and knocked out the power supply.

The Kremlin’s recent announcement that it would nationalize the plant has drawn international denunciation, and on Saturday the European Union’s top foreign policy official, Josep Borrell Fontelles, in a statement condemned Russia’s seizure of the facility “in the strongest possible terms,” calling it “illegal.”

Zaporizhzhia, the largest nuclear plant in Europe, has been under the control of the Russian military since early March. But it has continued to be operated by its Ukrainian staff, even as a battle for control of the area has raged nearby, raising concerns about the potential for a nuclear catastrophe.

The news of the latest cutoff was later confirmed by Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“The resumption of shelling, hitting the plant’s sole source of external power, is tremendously irresponsible,” Mr. Grossi said in a statement that did not assign blame for the shelling. He called the implementation of a security protection zone around the plant “an absolute and urgent imperative.”

Engineers had already begun work to repair the line, the agency said, noting that 16 of the plant’s diesel generators began operating automatically to provide the facility’s six reactors with power.

“After the situation stabilized, 10 of the generators were switched off, leaving six to provide the reactors with necessary electricity,” the agency said.

Mr. Grossi was in Kyiv on Thursday for talks with Ukrainian leaders and plans to visit Russia early next week to try to come up with a security arrangement for the site.

The nuclear agency has maintained a presence at Zaporizhzhia plant since early September, and a new team rotated in this week to provide independent observation and assessment of the plant.

Hours earlier, the I.A.E.A. said that a damaged power line had also temporarily forced one of the units onto its emergency diesel generators on Thursday.

External power is needed for cooling and other essential nuclear safety and security functions, the agency said. The plant had only one external power line available out of four lines available before the conflict, which was what was cut early on Saturday.

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In Ukraine, a country facing the sea and crisscrossed by rivers, bridges are crucial.

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The remains of one of the main bridges in Bakhmut, Ukraine, last month. For military planners, control of infrastructure plays a critical role in battles.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

The explosion that caused the partial collapse on Saturday of the Kerch Strait Bridge linking Crimea with Russia illustrates a crucial fact about Ukraine’s war that both sides have been quick to grasp: In a country facing the sea and crisscrossed by rivers, bridges are a vital military asset.

Since Moscow illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, the Kerch rail and road bridge has acted as a supply route to Russia’s big military base on the peninsula in Sevastopol. And since capturing the province of Kherson in southern Ukraine in March, Moscow has used the bridge to ferry troops and equipment to the region through Crimea.

In any war, success is primarily measured on the outcome of battles. But for military planners, control of infrastructure plays a critical role. That’s why it was no surprise to many that when Ukraine launched its counteroffensive in the south in late August, it targeted the bridges that Russia had been using as supply routes.

“Anything that involves water adds incredible logistical constraints in any military operation,” said Samantha de Bendern, an associate fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, a British think tank. “Controlling a bridge or destroying it is incredibly important.”

One of Ukraine’s highest-profile targets has been the Antonivsky Bridge, which spans the Dnipro River at Kherson City and is almost a mile long. Completed in 1985, the bridge was a symbol to many Ukrainians of engineering prowess. Since July, Ukraine’s military has repeatedly struck the bridge using long-range HIMARS missiles supplied by the United States, making it harder for Russia to resupply as many as 25,000 troops it has stationed on the western shore of the Dnipro.

Ukrainian forces also have targeted three other bridges in Kherson Province, two of which span the Dnipro, northeast of Kherson, and one that crosses the much narrower Inhulets River.

That has forced Russia to construct pontoon bridges, which themselves are vulnerable to attack, and to ferry reinforcements and supplies by boat. In the fight for Kherson Province, however, Ukrainian forces say that both sides have made use of pontoon bridges, and both sides have also made a practice of destroying them, sometimes with the help of drones.

“We build them, they blow them up,” Col. Roman Kostenko, the Ukrainian commander of the troops stationed in Kherson Province, said in August of the pontoon bridges. “They build them, we blow them up.”

Bridges have also proved crucial in battles farther east, not least because troops are exposed to artillery fire when they attempt to cross rivers.

It is no surprise, therefore, that Moscow used a river, in this case the eastern bank of the Oskil River, as its defensive line after it was forced to retreat in Kharkiv Province in the face of a rapid Ukrainian counteroffensive in early September. The Oskil River line has now been breached, with Ukraine making gains farther east.

Ukrainian forces routed a Russian battalion in May as it tried to cross a series of pontoon bridges over the Siversky Donets River.

“Conducting river crossings in a contested environment is a highly risky maneuver,” an agency of the British Ministry of Defense said at the time.

Weeks later, Russian forces — on the advance around two cities in Luhansk Province bisected by the Siversky Donets — were able to pressure Ukrainian troops into a retreat when they shelled the bridges and took them out of use, making resupply and evacuation much more perilous. They captured both cities shortly afterward.

The sudden vulnerability of the Kerch bridge will most likely force Moscow to scramble for alternative ways to supply its troops. Mick Ryan, a military expert, said that one solution could be to route supplies through the city of Melitopol, which Russia captured early in the conflict. But that city has itself been the subject of attacks by Ukrainian partisans.

Russian soldiers, fleeing southern Ukraine, leave haunting mementos.

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Sereda Snizhana, 28, with her children, Artem, 2, and Ilona, 4, in their home in Dudchany, Ukraine, on Saturday. Ms. Snizhana and her family lived for months without electricity, water and gas while Russian forces occupied the town.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times
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An abandoned Russian outpost.
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A Ukrainian soldier sitting in the shade near a drone he operated to adjust artillery fire.

Volodymyr Minko was at home in Dudchany, in the Kherson region of Ukraine, cleaning windows with his wife, when they noticed Russian soldiers hurrying out of a house across the street. The soldiers, Mr. Minko said, grabbed their belongings and fled in cars, leaving behind some weapons and ammunition.

“They left in such a rush,” Mr. Minko, 64, said. “It was obvious what was happening at that point: It was the end of them.”

The withdrawal of Russian forces last week from several villages on the west bank of the Dnipro River, including Dudchany, brought a welcome respite from the fear and unease that had gripped the area for months. But even as Ukrainian forces reclaim territory in Kherson, in the country’s south, the presence of the Russian occupation lingers — in possessions and munitions forsaken along the front lines, but also in the minds of residents who still remain far too close to the conflict.

Although homes in Dudchany sustained little structural damage, a few days ago a man there was killed in a Russian shelling attack. On a recent day, smoke bloomed to the south, from Ukrainian artillery shells that had detonated.

Since last Tuesday, when Ukrainian forces entered the village, Mr. Minko and his wife, Nataliia Minko, have been serving them meals while listening to the sound of Russian aircraft circling their otherwise bucolic settlement.

Mrs. Minko, 52, smiled as she ladled borscht into bowls in her kitchen before taking it out to Ukrainian soldiers who sat around her garden table. On Tuesday, she said, she and Mr. Minko awoke early to see three cars driving down the nearby highway.

“Listen!” Mr. Minko said, according to her recounting. “Those cars sound different from the Russian ones.”

As the cars approached, they realized it was Ukrainian soldiers who were coming.

“We hugged them,” Mrs. Minko said, “and cried.”

In a house at the opposite end of the street, Sereda Snizhana, 28, held her two children, Artem, 2, and Ilona, 4. They had been without electricity, gas and water for months, and could not afford to buy firewood.

“We didn’t want to leave because we didn’t want to leave our home,” Ms. Snizhana said. “We’re now relying on help from the Ukrainian soldiers.”

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Nataliia Minko, 52, serves soup to Ukrainian soldiers in her home in Dudchany on Saturday.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

Back at the Minko household, Mr. Minko scoffed when asked about Russia’s attempts to illegally annex Kherson and three other Ukrainian regions after referendums in September that were widely discredited.

“I voted no in the sham referendum,” he said. “I’ve been living in Ukraine for 64 years. Why should I vote to join Russia? It was hilarious to be a ‘part’ of Russia, because it was fake. Everything was decided before the referendum.”

But not all of the approximately 3,000 Russian soldiers who were stationed in Dudchany immediately abandoned their posts. On Friday night, Mrs. Minko said, the Ukrainians caught an enemy soldier sleeping, hidden in a haystack.

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Biden warned of a nuclear Armageddon. How likely is a nuclear conflict with Russia?

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President Biden, at an appearance in Hagerstown, Md., on Friday as his administration worked to soften his statements about nuclear war delivered at a fund-raiser the day before.Credit...Oliver Contreras for The New York Times

When President Biden delivered a blunt warning at a fund-raiser last Thursday that the war in Ukraine could devolve into a nuclear “Armageddon,” he raised a terrifying prospect that many Americans had not worried much about since the end of the Cold War.

White House officials did not walk back Mr. Biden’s statement; they knew it reflected a deep concern that has sent Pentagon and intelligence officials gaming out different scenarios, from a test detonation over the Black Sea to the use of a nuclear weapon against, say, a Ukrainian military base. But the White House emphasized on Friday that the United States has seen no signs that Russia is gearing up to use nuclear weapons.

But it has been 30 years since most Americans have talked about nuclear deterrence, the difference between tactical and strategic weapons and what havoc a 10 kiloton bomb can trigger versus a 100 kiloton one. So what was the president talking about?

Here is what we know:

As his army loses ground, Putin has been rattling his nuclear saber.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, in an angry speech last month full of bluster and anti-American rhetoric, clearly raised the specter of using nuclear weapons to hold on to his slipping territorial gains in Ukraine.

Mr. Putin said he would use “all available means” to defend Russian territory — which he declared includes four provinces of eastern Ukraine that Russia has attempted to illegally annex. He also argued that the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Japan in 1945 “created a precedent.”

Mr. Biden, last Thursday, said: “For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat to the use of nuclear weapons, if in fact things continue down the path they are going.”

So far, U.S. officials say they think the chances of Russia using nuclear weapons are low.

Senior American officials say they have seen no evidence that Mr. Putin is moving any of his nuclear assets, especially in Russia’s stockpile of about 2,000 small tactical weapons.

Even though Mr. Putin called for his nuclear forces to go on alert in late February, there has been no evidence that they did. But events like the attack on the Kerch Strait Bridge over the weekend worry officials who fear that a humiliated Putin is more likely to lash out.

Still, U.S. officials have been weighing possible scenarios.

Senior U.S. officials are far more concerned than they were at the start of the conflict about the possibility of Mr. Putin deploying tactical nuclear weapons.

After a series of humiliating retreats, astoundingly high casualty rates and a deeply unpopular move to draft young Russian men into service, Mr. Putin clearly sees the threat of his nuclear arsenal as a way to instill fear and perhaps to recover some respect for Russia’s power.

For months, computer simulations from the Pentagon, American nuclear labs and intelligence agencies have been trying to model what might happen and how the United States could respond.

The threshold at which Mr. Putin would resort to nuclear weapons — or how he would use them — is far from clear. The primary utility of a tactical nuclear strike, many U.S. officials say, would be as part of a last-ditch effort by Mr. Putin to halt the Ukrainian counteroffensive by threatening to make parts of the country uninhabitable.

Russia would most likely deploy tactical nuclear arms, which have smaller payloads than intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Analysts say that if Mr. Putin does resort to nuclear weapons, the likeliest scenario would be a relatively small tactical strike, either on the battlefield or as a warning shot in an unpopulated area.

Tactical weapons come in many sizes and varieties, some with a small fraction of the destructive power of the bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and some with far larger power. They can be fired from an artillery gun or delivered with a missile.

But they are hard to use and are difficult to control. How much destruction — and lingering radiation — would result depends on factors that include the size of the weapon and the winds. Even a small nuclear explosion could kill thousands and render a base or downtown area uninhabitable for years.

The risks for Mr. Putin could easily outweigh any gains: Depending on the natural winds, the radiation released by Russian weapons could easily blow back into Russian territory.

The West has been vague about how it would respond.

Mr. Biden recently said that the United States would “respond forcefully” if Mr. Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon. In May he wrote in an essay for The Times that “any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict on any scale” would “entail severe consequences.” His national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Sept. 25 there would be “catastrophic consequences” and those had been communicated to Moscow.

But that does not necessarily mean a retaliatory nuclear strike, which could trigger a broader war. For months, administration officials have said they could think of almost no circumstances in which a nuclear detonation by Russia in Ukraine would result in a nuclear response from the United States.

There have been discussions of several other military responses, such as using conventional weapons against a base or unit from which the attack originated, or giving Ukrainian forces the weaponry to launch that counterattack.

But many of the options under discussion also involve nonmilitary steps, including further cutting Russia off from the world economy and casting Mr. Putin as an international pariah. It would be a chance, some officials say, to bring China and India, along with much of Asia and Africa, into the effort to impose sanctions on Russia, taking away some of the biggest remaining markets for its oil and gas.

Ukraine wants a long-range American missile. The U.S. is holding it back.

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The Pentagon’s Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, can strike targets 190 miles away.Credit...Yonhap News Agency/Via Reuters

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Pentagon officials have sent the Ukrainian military an array of equipment totaling billions of dollars. But one powerful weapon, called the Army Tactical Missile System, has become part of a debate about the limits of U.S. support for its ally.

The long-range missile — known as ATACMS and pronounced like “attack ’ems” — can strike targets 190 miles away with a warhead containing about 375 pounds of explosives. It can be fired from the HIMARS mobile launchers that the United States has provided Ukraine, as well as from older M270 launchers sent from Britain and Germany.

Ukrainian officials say the missile could help them regain Crimea, a part of the country that Russia seized in 2014. But Pentagon officials insist they are already giving Ukraine the weapons it most needs: Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, or GMLRS.

The ATACMS is such a sensitive issue because the White House has concerns that Ukraine could use it to strike targets deep inside Russia, and that President Vladimir V. Putin might respond by escalating the war, possibly by invading a neighboring NATO country. Ukraine has insisted it has no plans to strike Russian cities or target civilians.

We’re trying to avoid World War III,” President Biden has said.

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Russians fleeing the draft find an unlikely haven in Central Asia.

Tens of thousands of men have ended up in places like Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet territory, that normally see few refugees but are willing to take them.

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — On the dusty, sunny streets of Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, bands of young migrants, nearly all men, wander aimlessly, dazed at their world turned upside down — and their hasty, self-imposed exile to a poor, remote country that few could previously place on a map.

After leaving often well-paying jobs and families in Moscow and Vladivostok and many places in between, tens of thousands of young Russians — terrified of being dragooned into fighting in Ukraine — are pouring into Central Asia by plane, car and bus.

The influx has turned Kyrgyzstan — a country long scorned in Russia as a source of cheap labor and backward ways — into an unlikely and, for the most part, welcoming haven for Russian men.

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News analysis

Biden turns to lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis to deal with Putin’s nuclear threat.

Image
President Biden said on Thursday that the world may be facing “the prospect of Armageddon” if Russia uses a tactical nuclear weapon.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

President Biden’s declaration on Thursday night that the world may be facing “the prospect of Armageddon” if President Vladimir V. Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine included a revealing side note: that Mr. Biden has been looking to help the Russian president find an “off-ramp” that might avert the worst outcome.

His logic came right out of the Cuban Missile Crisis, to which Mr. Biden referred twice in his comments at a Democratic fund-raiser in New York, a good indication of what is on his mind. In that famous case — the closest the world came to a full nuclear exchange, 60 years ago this month — President John F. Kennedy struck a secret bargain with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, to remove American missiles from Turkey.

With that deal, which came to light only later, a disaster that could have killed tens of millions of Americans and untold numbers of Soviet citizens was averted.

For weeks now, Mr. Biden’s aides have been debating whether there might be an analogous understanding, a way for the wounded Russian leader to find an out. They have offered no details, knowing that secrecy may be the key to seeking any successful exit and avoiding the conditions in which a cornered Mr. Putin reaches for his battlefield nuclear weapons. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, reiterated on Friday that Mr. Biden had no new intelligence about nuclear weapons use and said she “saw no indications” the Russians were “preparing to use them.”

The Daily Poster

Listen to ‘The Daily’: What Are Tactical Nuclear Weapons?

President Vladimir V. Putin has threatened to use a particular kind of arm in Ukraine.
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transcript

Listen to ‘The Daily’: What Are Tactical Nuclear Weapons?

President Vladimir V. Putin has threatened to use a particular kind of arm in Ukraine.

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

sabrina tavernise

From “The New York Times” I’m Sabrina Tavernise, and this is “The Daily.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

If Vladimir Putin ever follows through with his threat to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, he’s likely to use a very particular kind of nuclear weapon. Today, I talk to my colleague, Bill Broad on what that weapon is, how it works, and what it would mean to deploy it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It’s Friday, October 7th.

So Bill, two weeks ago, we did an episode with our colleague Anton. And he told us that Putin had effectively declared a chunk of Ukraine Russian territory. And he said that if it was attacked, he would fight back. And he kind of hinted that he would use his nuclear arsenal. So this whole week, the Ukrainians are making a lot of military advances in that very area that Putin was talking about.

And so everyone, you know I’m in DC here, is talking about this and kind of on edge. Are we in a new, more dangerous moment in the world? So we wanted to ask you, Bill, what would an attack like this look like? I mean, when I think of nuclear weapons, I think of a mushroom cloud? Is that what we’re talking about?

bill broad

We’re not, although that tends to be the thing that we all conjure up in our minds, these big horrible things. We saw one over Hiroshima. We’ve seen pictures of tests around the globe where these frightening huge things would scare and intimidate everybody into all these unthinkable scenarios. What we’re talking about now is extremely different. It’s a whole different dark universe that grew up in parallel to this ginormous scary world of mushroom clouds.

sabrina tavernise

OK, different universe, they grew up in parallel. So tell me about that, Bill. How are the nuclear weapons of today different from the ones that we have in our mind?

bill broad

They’re fundamentally much, much, much, much smaller. They call them tactical nukes. They are tiny fractions of the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and tiny, tiny little fractions of the super bombs and the city busters that everybody worried about during the Cold War. In comparison to all that and to everything we’ve known and thought about publicly for a long time, they are minuscule.

sabrina tavernise

So how did these smaller ones, in this new world you’re talking about, come to be?

bill broad

Well, they all grew out of the very first atomic weapons. The one we all remember, was Hiroshima.

[EXPLOSION]

1945 ended World War II.

archived recording

The city of Hiroshima lies prostrate after the withering blast which wiped out 53,000 of its population.

bill broad

The big mushroom cloud over this Japanese city and one over Nagasaki too.

archived recording

Four square miles of buildings leveled by the first of two small bombs that decided the fate of Japan. That’s what’s indelibly imprinted on our minds.

sabrina tavernise

Right.

archived recording

Another evidence of the enemy’s final inability to wage war.

bill broad

Well, after that, we went into the next chapter of the Cold War, where there was this global race for bigger and better and more terrible weapons.

archived recording

History turns its most ominous page far out in mid-pacific, where in the Enewetak Atoll, the world’s most awesome weapon is readied for detonation.

bill broad

And they got enormously large compared to Hiroshima. They were called H-bombs.

archived recording

Here on a Elugelab Island, the cab or housing for the first hydrogen bomb takes shape after months of preparation.

bill broad

And we popped our first one in 1952.

archived recording

The pictures you are about to see have been released by the Department of Defense under presidential order.

bill broad

They put a device on an Island in the South Pacific. And they tested it.

archived recording

Five-er, four, three, two, one T zero.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

The ball of fire is three miles across as it shatters both land and sea.

bill broad

And it was 700 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb with a mushroom cloud that just went into the stratosphere.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

archived recording

In seconds, the fireball erupts into a geyser the towers 25 miles into the stratosphere spreading into 100-mile wide mushroom cloud.

bill broad

I mean, it was so big it just blew people’s minds.

archived recording

Rising with the cloud are millions of cubic feet of radioactive ash. A virulent byproduct of the fusion bomb that will shower down over the area in approximately one hour.

bill broad

But the Soviets, not wanting to be outdone in this great race,

archived recording

[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]

bill broad

Detonated one that was

[EXPLOSION]

3,000 times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb

archived recording

[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]

bill broad

I mean, imagine that one weapon, something you could fit in your closet there or it would sit comfortably in your living room, having the destructive power of 3,000 Hiroshimas.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

sabrina tavernise

And this was the United States and the Soviet Union making these bigger and better bombs.

bill broad

Both of us in a big race. And this is the part of the history that we all kind of intuitively know. There was a race to make these super bombs and these city busters, and we got into this kind of straitjacket of mutually assured destruction, where nobody could do anything because if we did X they’d do Y, and we’d annihilate each other. And because of how unthinkable the whole situation was, It was a standoff.

sabrina tavernise

OK, so those were the big bombs of the Cold War era, of the arms race, but what you said we’re talking about today is something different, right? Something smaller. So tell me about that.

bill broad

So while we were popping all these enormous big bombs that got everybody’s attention, there was a whole parallel effort, under the radar, that the public really wasn’t aware of, and I wasn’t aware of as a reporter until late in my career, in which they developed bombs that were incredibly small.

We’re talking about things like a big toaster. One of them was called the Davy Crockett, after the great frontiersman and American folk hero. It was like a watermelon with fins on the back.

sabrina tavernise

But that means also, presumably, that they weren’t as strong, right?

bill broad

No, that’s it. They weren’t as strong. Their blasts were a tiny fraction of the Hiroshima bomb. The Davy Crockett, this little watermelon with fins, it was 1,000th of the power of the Hiroshima bomb, but these bombs were not meant to blow up cities. They were meant for the battlefield. They were small, portable but still powerful enough to blow up a bridge or take out a dam or destroy a train yard or a storage tank or a command bunker vaporizing it, gone, off the battlefield.

And it was all from nuclear technology, which put into a tiny little package the power of a ginormous conventional weapon. It just put a huge amount of power in your hands.

sabrina tavernise

But, Bill, why though? I mean, why did they feel like they needed these small things?

bill broad

They needed them for Europe. It was a techie fix for a terrible situation. They wanted little bombs that could stop the Soviet hordes cold. The Soviets could, with a snap of their fingers, create armies with millions of men, and they did. Their standing army was something like 4 or 5 million people. We couldn’t do that in the West. The democracies couldn’t get that many people up on the front lines.

So rather than turning ourselves into dictatorships and forcing everybody to march to the front lines, we went, hey, guys, let’s make teeny-weeny little bombs that’ll intimidate the Soviets and stop these hordes. They’ll know about it. We’ll advertise it.

We’ll send signals. We’ll let them know that our planes are practicing with this. That we have nuclear artillery shells 8-inches wide that exactly look like conventional shells but guess what? They’re nuclear. It’ll be a real bad day on the invasion front.

sabrina tavernise

So the West is essentially thinking, OK, we don’t have the manpower to counter the Soviets who can just get everybody in their country to fight, and instead, they were going to use this newfangled and potentially, quite devastating new weapon to stop them.

bill broad

Right, and they went wild with it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NATO, our Western European partners, put, get this, 7,400, 7400 of these weapons all across Western Europe at the peak of the Cold War. It was like you could have one in every kitchen. They were everywhere. And they were ready to go, at a moment’s notice, to try to counteract the hordes.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

sabrina tavernise

And what about the Soviets, bill? Did they also develop these smaller tactical nuclear weapons?

bill broad

They did, but it took a while. Typically, in the history of the arms races, we have always been the leaders. We developed the first H-bombs. We developed the first A-bombs. The Soviets always would lag a few to many years behind, but they eventually started doing this too. And we kind of got into yet another arms race. A tit-for-tat race with smaller bombs that the public didn’t really follow that was another kind of invisible part of the East-West standoff.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

sabrina tavernise

So eventually, the Soviet Union collapses Cold War ends. What happens to all these things?

bill broad

Well, we come to agreements to cut back our very big arsenals with these city busters that would get flung halfway around the world. We went from tens of thousands of these things down to what today, in East and West, are big long-range arsenals of about 1,500 weapons.

sabrina tavernise

Wow.

bill broad

But the little stuff has a more checkered history. Right at the end of the Cold War, we both agreed to get these off the battlefield because they were so small, we didn’t want terrorists and crazy people running off with them.

sabrina tavernise

It was the time of Osama bin Laden and of rising Islamic terrorism.

bill broad

Absolutely, so there was a big push, a bilateral push, to get these things in safe places. And the result of that is that in the West, a lot of these small weapons got disassembled and taken to bunkers, where they sit today. They’re in parts and pieces and maybe some of the material turned back into just handy-dandy material for the day we might want it.

We now have on the order of 100 tactical weapons in Western Europe.

sabrina tavernise

Just 100?

bill broad

Just 100, right.

sabrina tavernise

Why did NATO keep so few. What was the thinking there?

bill broad

The thinking, it was that these things were dangerous because they were so small. They were easy to lose and easy to be misplaced. And they didn’t have the serious, serious command and control functions that we had for these big super weapons and city busters that would go on top of intercontinental ballistic missiles. So the decision was made to just downsize radically, which they did.

sabrina tavernise

And what about the Russians? Did they reciprocate?

bill broad

They did in the sense that they pulled a lot of these tacticals off the battlefield and put them into storage areas, but unlike the US, they didn’t disassemble them. So these weapons are still around. 2000 of them ready to go.

sabrina tavernise

Wow. That’s a lot more.

bill broad

Yes, it could make for a terrible bad day if they started going off.

sabrina tavernise

It’s kind of surprising that the US would just voluntarily get rid of these things while Russia kept theirs. Wasn’t this process governed by the same type of treaties and arrangements that they use for the big bombs?

bill broad

No, and that’s one of the surprising parts of this whole story. These things were never regulated by treaties. We just decided to ditch them. The Cold War was over. The Soviet Union collapsed. Their military apparatus was a shambles. Their economy was crippled. War was not going to break out. The much feared invasion of West Germany and Western Europe was not about to happen.

They could barely feed their soldiers, much less marshal a group of them to invade Europe. We didn’t need these weapons anymore, and nukes are unimaginably dangerous. Nobody wanted to use these things.

sabrina tavernise

OK, so we decided we didn’t need them. We got rid of most of them, even though we had no guarantee that Russia would reciprocate.

bill broad

Right, so nobody thought about this a lot in public. In the secret councils of Washington, in the National Security Council and the Pentagon, they were just old news.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Until Russia, in recent years, emerged as a major aggressor on the world stage plowing into Ukraine and starting to make all these threats again about its great nuclear arsenal.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

sabrina tavernise

We’ll be right back.

So, Bill, the Russians have a lot of these smaller, tactical, nuclear weapons. If Putin decides he wants to use one, what does that actually look like? What are his options?

bill broad

Well, it all depends, right? The one that analysts talk about over and over is the shock-and-awe technique, where Putin says, let me take one of these things. They’re not so big. The world won’t end, but I’ll take it and I’ll pop it off over the Baltic or the Black Sea.

No mushroom cloud, just this instantaneous bright flash like all of a sudden a second sun. The satellites will notice. The West will notice. NATO and the US will notice. And it will send a terrifying message that I’m willing to break the nuclear taboo that’s been in place for 77 years.

Or, if he wanted to take out, say, a Ukrainian military base, one of his main options would be this missile that our NATO partners know very well called the Iskander. It has a range of about 300 miles. It has two big tactical rockets that can get carried on a truck. Usually, the Iskanders have conventional warheads, but they also take nuclear warheads.

So Putin could order the nuclear Iskander warheads to be taken out of storage, run up in Russia to somewhere relatively close to the front lines, and aim it toward that base. Now, that’s not the end of the story because all these detonations of nuclear weapons have lots of options, mainly, the height of the burst.

sabrina tavernise

So there are all these different dimensions to how this thing could actually be used, including where it physically explodes.

bill broad

Yes, let’s say you just wanted to scare the bejesus out of them. Maybe you’d detonate it 1,000 feet above the base. Maybe you just start some fires in the surrounding woods and kill maybe 100 people rather than 1,000 or something. But if you really want to create a nightmare for somebody, make sure it’s a ground burst. Because then all the stuff that gets vaporized on the ground becomes radioactive.

So you multiply the radiation many, many, many times over if you do a ground burst, which is why sites can be uninhabitable for a long time. The Hiroshima bomb was detonated at a height of 1,500 feet. There was prompt radiation. It happened very quickly, and that killed a lot of people, but there wasn’t this radiation that lasted for years and decades.

They went around with Geiger counters through Hiroshima afterwards, and there was very little residual radiation. So how these things are detonated is as important as what they are.

sabrina tavernise

I’m remembering now, Chernobyl. And I actually have a friend who was living in Belarus at the time and said that the wind carried the radiation toward him as a child and that everybody remembers that. And I guess I’m thinking if Putin explodes a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, wouldn’t that be a risk for him as well? The wind carrying the radiation and effectively, making parts of Russia toxic?

bill broad

Right, that’s a great question. And the answer is it depends on what mother nature is thinking that day. Usually, at the latitude of Kyiv, you’re right smack dab in what they call the westerlies. These are trade winds. They blow constantly from west to east. And that’s what you would normally have had over Chernobyl, which is very close to Kyiv.

On that day, however, instead of the westerlies blowing, which would have taken the radiation to Kazakhstan, the winds were coming out of the south and the southeast. So the radiation got blown north to Belarus and to Russia. So it’s this fickle aspect of nature that really has the final vote in all this.

sabrina tavernise

So it sounds like Putin has a lot of options for how he could actually use these tactical weapons, but at the same time, there’s a significant element of risk for him.

bill broad

Exactly right, huge uncertainty, technical uncertainty, political uncertainty, right? He’s going into this world that we haven’t been in in modern times. It’s full of all kinds of scary unknowns.

sabrina tavernise

Well, so let’s talk about that. What are the consequences if Putin actually does this? If he actually detonates a bomb in Ukraine or anywhere in the region, say, what would be the response from the rest of the world?

bill broad

Well, Russia’s hoping that they would escalate to deescalate, which is a kind of a fancy way of saying that, well, the shock and awe of it would mean that everybody on the other side would basically throw up their hands and surrender.

sabrina tavernise

And would that happen?

bill broad

My understanding is that the Biden administration has thought about it a lot. And they think that the civilized world would be so appalled that even Putin’s best buddies, China and India and these dictatorial countries that get in bed with Russia, they would all be so appalled that he would suddenly be losing huge political support.

Sanctions, all of a sudden, would come in with huge force, and the administration’s game plan, as I understand it, often through the eyes of my good colleague David Sanger, who reports on this stuff deeply in Washington, is that they would not respond with a nuclear detonation.

sabrina tavernise

And is the reason because they don’t have any of those tactical nukes anymore, the small ones, or is it because they’re afraid of escalation?

bill broad

I think it’s both those things. We don’t have those tactical nuclear weapons to be able to climb that little escalatory ladder anymore, which was the thing in the Cold War. There was this whole theory of escalatory cycles which were supposed to deter the attacks.

They pop a five-kiloton bomb, we pop a five-kiloton bomb, but now, I think the thought process is, we don’t want to get into a tit for tat where suddenly one of the few tactical weapons that we have in Europe gets used on a Russian city and Putin decides to take out Chicago or Los Angeles.

So the prevailing wisdom in the administration appears to be that we would use our conventional firepower to retaliate or share that conventional firepower with Ukraine, so they could retaliate. And we do have this unbelievable arsenal of conventional weapons, which are hugely precise, incredibly smart, filled with chips, guided by satellites, and could rain down on Mother Russia in a way that she would never forget.

sabrina tavernise

One thing that I don’t really get about Putin and the nuclear scenario is that his whole goal is to actually take over Ukraine is to sort of have it as Russian territory. That’s what he’s trying to do. So why would he risk poisoning a whole lot of the territory of the country he’s trying to take over? It just doesn’t really make any sense.

bill broad

Right, none of it, really to me, makes a whole lot of sense. The only thing that makes sense is not using it on a battlefield using it as a shock and awe technique to say, I’m willing to cross the line. Are you? Now, the thing to keep in mind is throughout all the escalations in this war, the United States has found zero evidence that nuclear weapons that are in storage units are being taken out.

Submarines, in their pens, are not being put out to sea with nuclear missiles, which would happen if we were facing Armageddon. Special trucks are not pulling up to cruise-missile batteries with nuclear warheads.

sabrina tavernise

But what’s that telling us?

bill broad

It’s telling us that we’re in this period of bluff and bluster.

sabrina tavernise

Hmm.

bill broad

There are no concrete preparations, that I’m aware of, that Washington’s aware of, to wage a nuclear war, not even with one of these little babies. It’s still this great drama that Putin is running, and it has to do with scare tactics.

sabrina tavernise

It’s almost like the threats themselves are his power, right?

bill broad

Right.

sabrina tavernise

He’s in peak power now, and as soon as he uses them —

bill broad

It goes away. And not only goes away, he, as a force on the world stage, collapses.

sabrina tavernise

Right.

bill broad

That’s the US playbook, and I think there’s something to it.

sabrina tavernise

Which makes me think he won’t actually use them, right?

bill broad

Oh, I hope so. To the extent that he’s a rational player, he won’t, but the thing about Vladimir Putin, he’s unpredictable. And he’s using that to his advantage, right?

sabrina tavernise

Indeed.

bill broad

Primarily, with this invasion, which all the experts said wouldn’t happen. And it did.

sabrina tavernise

Right, the wild card is he surprised us a lot, and that’s the real danger.

bill broad

Right, the danger is that Vladimir Putin would usher us into an unpredictable new age. Would this start a chain reaction of events? Would people start rearming themselves. Would people start popping bombs. And what if it was a small bomb? And oh, it wasn’t so bad. He crossed this line, and maybe we should start using these in other conflicts, and who knows where that goes?

You could go up the escalatory chain reaction and they get bigger and bigger and next thing you know, they’re dusting off the old super bombs from the Cold War and starting to think about vaporizing big cities. It goes to so many potentially bad places, you quickly get back into that unthinkable territory, which was the thing that made the Cold War work.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Because on both sides it was unthinkable. There was a game plan. And everybody knew the rules. The Soviet embassy and the American embassy people would all get together on holidays, and their children went to the same schools in Moscow. And everybody knew the game. We were comfortable with the standoff.

But now, you’re starting in a asymmetrical situation rather than the standoff. We don’t know where this game goes. And that’s what makes it so frightening to me as a reporter who watches this stuff. It just seems like it’s a chain reaction you don’t want to start because you have no idea where it’s going to go.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

sabrina tavernise

Bill, thank you.

bill broad

Thank you.

sabrina tavernise

On Thursday night, President Joe Biden said the risk of, quote “nuclear Armageddon is at its highest since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.” Biden, who was speaking at a fundraiser in New York City, said, that Putin was quote “not joking” when he talks about the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

[OMINOUS MUSIC]

We’ll be right back.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Here’s what else you should know today.

archived recording (joe biden)

As I said when I ran for president, no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana.

sabrina tavernise

On Thursday, President Biden pardoned all people convicted of marijuana possession charges under federal law clearing about 6,500 people who were convicted between 1992 and 2021.

archived recording (joe biden)

There are thousands of people who were convicted for marijuana possession who may be denied employment, housing, or educational opportunities as a result of that conviction. My pardon will remove this burden on them.

sabrina tavernise

Marijuana is fully legal in about 20 states. And Biden said he wanted to stop sending people to jail for conduct that is already permitted in a lot of the country. The vast majority of simple marijuana possession charges are brought by the states, not the federal government. And Biden encouraged states to follow suit noting, that there were racial disparities around prosecution and conviction.

archived recording (joe biden)

Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana. It’s time that we right these wrongs.

sabrina tavernise

And in Thailand, a former police officer went on a shooting spree inside a daycare center killing 36 people, 24 of them children. The shooter was a 34-year-old man who’d been fired from the police force for drug possession. The victims included a two-year-old and a teacher who was eight months pregnant. It was the worst mass shooting by a sole perpetrator in Thailand’s history and exceeds the death toll of the deadliest American school shooting at Sandy Hook. Thailand’s gun homicide rate is lower than America’s, but is among the highest in Asia.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Today’s episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Luke Vander Ploeg and Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Liz O. Baylen and Paige Cowett, contains original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, and Marion Lozano and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. We’ll see you Tuesday after the holiday.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

After Mr. Biden’s remarks, some foreign leaders said they would like to go back to the days when nuclear threats were not discussed in public.

“We must speak with prudence when commenting on such matters,” France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said on Friday in Prague.

But as one senior European diplomat said recently, when the history of this era is written, many will be shocked at how much work was underway to assess the risks of a nuclear detonation — and to think about how to deter it.

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