ahead of schedule
Workers completely restored the Crimean Bridge 18 days ahead of schedule. reported Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin is on the Telegram channel.
According to him, vehicular traffic has been opened in all four lanes of the highway. Repair work was carried out for three months. During this time, builders dismantled two damaged spans and installed new ones.
“The Crimean Bridge was fully restored 18 days ahead of schedule and vehicular traffic was opened in all four lanes,” Khusnullin wrote.
The Deputy Prime Minister noted that the restoration was completed ahead of schedule “thanks to the heroic work of everyone involved in this unique work.”
July attack
The bridge had to be repaired after it was attacked by two Ukrainian drones on July 17. Due to the explosion, the road surface in the openings from Crimea was damaged. As a result, one of the bridge spans almost completely collapsed. However, the railway part of the road and the bridge supports remained intact.
As a result of sabotage, two people died: residents of the Belgorod region, parents of a little girl. They were driving across the bridge. The child was taken to hospital. He was diagnosed with a closed craniocerebral injury. The girl was later discharged. Russia’s Investigative Committee later opened a case of terrorist attack.
Commenting on the destruction, Russian President Vladimir Putin described the attack on the Crimean Bridge as meaningless from a military point of view. According to him, this pass “has not been used for military transportation for a long time.”
How was it restored?
Khusnullin soon announced that the part of the bridge structure destroyed by the explosion could not be fully restored immediately.
The night immediately after the attack, traffic on the bridge was started in reverse mode. At the end of July, the Russian government set a deadline of December 31, 2023 for the complete restoration of the facility. For individual sections of the pass, their own opening dates were set after repairs.
On September 14, the left side of the bridge was opened to vehicle traffic, one day earlier than planned. The right side of the bridge was expected to be restored by November 1. The repair of this section of the road was completed prematurely. Passenger vehicles departed from this highway on Saturday, October 14.
The restoration of the Crimean Bridge was carried out by the Nizhneangarsktransstroy company.
guilty of destruction
Representatives of the Ukrainian authorities did not officially confirm the involvement of their special services in the explosion in July, but made it clear who exactly was behind the explosion. A week after the incident, the head of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, Alexey Reznikov, said in an interview with CNN that the Ukrainian army would continue to attack Crimea and the Crimean Bridge. He described the peninsula and the bridge as Kiev’s “official targets”.
At the same time, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said that the Crimean Bridge was a target for the Ukrainian Armed Forces that “must be neutralized.”
This is not the first attack by the Ukrainian side on the Crimean Bridge. The bridge over the Kerch Strait was last attacked on October 8, 2022.
Later, as a result of the explosion of a truck passing through it, a part of the car was damaged and 3 people lost their lives. The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation opened a criminal case under the article on terrorism. The FSB appointed Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kirill Budanov as the organizer of the terrorist attack on the Crimean Bridge. Since then, investigators have been able to identify 12 accomplices involved in the preparation of the terrorist attack and have detained eight people.
Responsibility for this bombing was claimed in Ukraine a few days after the second attack. On July 26, SBU chief Vasily Malyuk said that the explosion on the Crimean Bridge in October 2022 was carried out under the control of its special services.