Russia-Ukraine WarExplosion on 12-Mile Crimea Bridge Kills 3
Crimea Roman Dmitriyev/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesKherson Region Nicole Tung for The New York TimesKyiv Ed Ram/Getty ImagesVelyka Oleksandrivka Nicole Tung for The New York TimesBashtanka Nicole Tung for The New York TimesKryvyi Rih Nicole Tung for The New York TimesKhreschenivka Dimitar Dilkoff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesKryvyi Rih Nicole Tung for The New York TimesVelyka Oleksandrivka Nicole Tung for The New York TimesKupiansk Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
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
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTKRYVYI 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’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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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTKHARKIV, 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.
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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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTKYIV — 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.
🚭Ukrzaliznytsia reminds - no smoking onboard the trains!😉 pic.twitter.com/ijeujhxnaq
— Ukrainian railways || Укрзалізниця (@Ukrzaliznytsia) October 8, 2022
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.
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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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTMissile 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.”
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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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe 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.
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.”
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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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTWhen 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.
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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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTBISHKEK, 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.
Some are poor, many are relatively affluent and highly educated — but all are united by a desperate desire to escape being caught up in President Vladimir V. Putin’s war in Ukraine.
“I look up at the clear sky every day and give thanks that I am here,” said Denis, an events organizer from Moscow who on a recent Friday joined scores of fellow Russians at a bar in Bishkek to rejoice at their escape and trade tips on places to sleep, getting Kyrgyz residency papers and finding work.
News analysis
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.”
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.