Ukraine says it hit Russia's bridge to Crimea with underwater explosives
KYIV: Ukraine's SBU security service said on Tuesday (Jun 3) that it had hit the road and rail bridge linking Russia and the Crimean peninsula below the water level with explosives.
In a statement, the SBU said it had used 1,100 kilograms of explosives that were detonated early in the morning and damaged underwater pillars of the bridge, a key supply route for Russian forces in Ukraine in the past.
The official Russian outlet which provides regular status updates on the bridge said its operation had been suspended for about three hours between 4 am and 7 am local time (9 am and 12 pm, Singapore time).
It gave no reason for the temporary closure, but said the bridge had been reopened and was functioning as normal.
"Previously, we hit the Crimean Bridge twice, in 2022 and 2023. So today we continued this tradition underwater," the SBU said in its statement, adding that the operation had been prepared over several months.
The SBU shared video footage that showed an explosion next to one of the many support pillars of the bridge.
Reuters was able to confirm the location from the structure and bearing elements of the bridge that matched satellite and file imagery of the area. Reuters was not able to independently verify when the video was filmed.
Russian military bloggers said the attack had been unsuccessful and speculated that it had been carried out by a Ukrainian sea drone.
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For some time now, even though some analysts have warned that something like this was not beyond the realm of possibility given the technology already available, it would have undoubtedly been a shock to see it put into practice so successfully and on such a scale. Everyone and their valuable military assets can be vulnerable to such threats. WHAT WENT DOWN IN OPERATION SPIDER'S WEB Hundreds of drones, each carrying an explosive munition, struck bases deep inside Russia – with the farthest one, Belaya, located in Siberia, just north of Russia's border with Mongolia and more than 4,000km from the Ukraine. These bases were likely chosen due to their housing of long-range, high-value Russian air assets such as bombers and surveillance aircraft. The former have been lobbing cruise missiles at Ukraine with impunity since the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022. 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Missiles are an expensive way to down drones that can be cheaper by orders of magnitude, while they, like guns, are limited by the amount of ammunition each system can be carried. Directed energy weapons have high power requirements which means they tend to have a large physical footprint. Japan has built and tested a 10-kilowatt directed energy C-UAS system that is mounted on a large eight-wheeled truck. Thus, a sufficiently large drone swarm has the potential to overwhelm missile-, gun- and energy-based C-UAS systems with their sheer numbers. Another issue is scaling, particularly in large countries like Russia, where literally thousands of systems need to be acquired to adequately protect every likely target. If the swarm uses the local mobile phone network to operate, as the Ukrainians are claiming, then jammers would be of limited utility as they operate on other frequencies. Both sides in the war have also been increasing the use of fibre-optic drones in the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, where operators control their drones via a fibre-optic cable attached to the drone that can stretch for tens of kilometres, meaning they cannot be jammed by electronic means. The other possible solution against the threat is what is termed passive defences. These include the building of hardened shelters that provide all-round protection for high-value assets that are at the very least capable of protection against smaller munitions explosive devices. It will take a lot of effort and will not come cheap, but the flipside is, what is the cost of leaving high value military assets like aircraft vulnerable to a threat that is no longer just hypothetical? It is a question that all countries will be quickly trying to answer now.
