Ukraine manages to nail a Russian train laden with war materials as it was transiting the Kerch Strait Bridge.
A massive fire is burning on the Kirch Strait Bridge that connects Russia to Crimea Saturday morning, with images showing multiple train cars fully engulfed and two spans of the road bridge in the water.
Traffic on the bridge, a critical strategic artery for Russian forces in Crimea amid its war in Ukraine, has reportedly been halted as heavy flames and black smoke spew from a train carrying unknown cargo. Photos also show spans of both east and westbound lanes have collapsed into the water near the burning train.
Yeah, it looks bad:
(20)#CrimeanBridge#Ukraine #Crimea #Крым pic.twitter.com/oq18tBJz6S
— Pierre Davide Borrelli (@PierreDBorrelli) October 8, 2022
The road span of the Crimean Bridge is sitting in the Kerch Strait pic.twitter.com/8Lpm3Q32Wq
— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) October 8, 2022
Those collapsed spans are potentially a huge blow to Russia’s entire war effort, as they were already having difficulties keeping all of their field units adequately supplied. With the Kerch Strait Bridge out of commission, the job of resupplying the southern front goes from being difficult to being an absolute nightmare, and makes Melitopol even more vital to keeping troops on the southern flank supplied.
The bridge cost billions to build after Russia seized Crimea in 2014 and has been one of Ukraine’s top targets, although it lacked traditional weaponry capable of striking it from far away. Even the Pentagon has openly stated that it sees the bridge as a viable target for Ukrainian forces. Russia has deployed air defenses and decoy barges in an attempt to protect it from some kind of attack in recent months.
It’s hard for even a competent military to have effective air defense all along possible logistics routes, and Russia has been far from a competent military in this war.
Suchomimus is on it:
He maps it as too far for HIMARS, and thinks it was likely a drone attack.
Russia has a 30,000 man strong rail organization. If it hasn’t suffered the same rot as the rest of the Russian armed forces (a big if), and if they can scrounge up the proper equipment (such as a crane barge; another big if), it could conceivably have the bridge repaired and usable again, possibly in as little as two to four weeks. It’s not easy, but it’s doable, and I imagine this is going to automatically jump to the top priority on the Russian logistics list. And, unlike the Antonovsky Bridge, it’s not currently in HIMARS range.
But given the gross incompetence Russia’s military has shown in so many areas, it’s no sure bet that it can be repaired that quickly (or even at all) with assets in or near the theater.
The clock is ticking…
Update: Now reading that it was a truck bomb that took it out, timed to hit a passing fuel train, and that certainly seems plausible from fiercely the train was burning.
Tags: Crimea, drone, Foreign Policy, Kerch Strait Bridge, Melitopol, Military, railroads, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Ukraine, video
That ain’t a two to four week repair job.
The single remaining half of the road bridge? Maybe. Having whatever happened next to it that took out the other half? That’s going to be something that requires extensive survey work, and that alone is going to take time. Before you put any kind of load on it, you need to ensure that the bearings for the bridge span are intact, that the span isn’t damaged, and… Yeah, it’s gonna be a bit.
The railway bridge is fuxxored. Having that much fuel burning on top of it? If the concrete and steel on that part of the bridge doesn’t require a full replacement for those spans affected, I’ll be surprised.
Russia is basically toast, at this point. The entire southern effort is now dangerously over-stretched, and odds are that there are going to be a bunch of Russian commanders looking at their logistics tables, crapping their pants, and then making the best of it.
Whoever was in charge of security for that bridge is dead man walking.
I’m honestly kind of impressed, at the demolition work here. Whoever did it managed a “twofer” with one shot, and I can’t even tell what it was. ATACMS? Truck bomb? Whatever it was, it answered the mail.
What Kirk said. Excellent analysis.
The fortunate timing of the blast to take out both the roadbed and the train’s tanker cars would seem to indicate on site observation and detonation. Don’t think a missile strike could achieve a similar level of success.
Reconstruction/repair will be a challenge for even the best and most efficient of engineers. Given the levels of incompetence and corruption shown by the Russian military establishment thus far, I will be surprised if they’ll be able to make any significant repairs. Additionally, repair equipment and crews will be nice fat targets for UA artillery and special operators.
It will, in my opinion, be enough to only destroy portions of the Kerch Bridge. Total destruction is not necessary. Keep nibbling away at it, hit the repair crews often, and disrupt the flow of supplies. A minimum of effort will achieve maximum results.
Happy birthday, Vlad!!
Bridge gone. Fine. Now how do 30,000 plus Russian troops evacuate? This has the Russians in a bind: do they surrender or fight their way out? How will they rescue those troops without a big, big conflagration that’ll look like WWII? This could be the end or the start of something really ugly.
Just to point out… The start was February 24th, and it was absolutely the choice of the Russians.
I’ve been predicting this end state for them from day one. Ukraine is not going to go “quietly into that good night”, and the Russian’s entire set of assumptions that they based their decisions on were as wrong as wrong could be.
One, the Ukrainians do not want to be “little Russians” again. They didn’t want it during the Holodomor, and they now have the capacity to resist Russian domination.
Two, the Russian military is shit. They fool themselves with all the “Russia Stronk” BS, but the reality is that they simply don’t have the underpinnings to support their efforts. Those missing underpinnings are primarily cultural; this is a nation that can’t put a stop to dedovschina in their barracks. They have no depth in their leadership; it’s all a thin smear of crappy rancid margarine on stale bread. You can’t produce decent corporals whose authority is respected in the barracks, let alone combat? LOL… Not in today’s environment, where discipline is everything. Look at all those pictures of left-behind tanks and trashed bivouac sites/fighting positions. That’s what you get with an army without NCOs.
The Russians make the same mistake that a lot of outside Western military observers make, thinking that the officers are the important bits of manpower in any military. The reality is, they’re essentially just part-time Christmas help, that do little else besides decide where to point the organization. The truly critical guys are those long-service NCO cadres that actually do everything like manage the ammo dumps and train the troops. You want to know why the Russians keep having these major issues with “accidental” explosions? Lot of it comes down to the fact that they don’t have trained and experienced NCO cadre running those places; they’ve got, instead, some young punk commissioned dipshit who has zero experience and who takes all of his knowledge out of some class he sat in and a book he was handed. Meanwhile, while he sits in an office somewhere, the troops are running riot out in the work areas, smoking cigarettes and doing stupid things that he can’t even identify because “inexperience”.
When Varus lost those legions in the Teutoburg forest, Augustus gave no shits whatsoever about Varus or the tribunes; those were Roman aristocratic twits, replaceable in a day. What Augustus was emotionally engaged by, on the other hand…? All those irreplaceable Centurions that actually made those legions work. The officers were eminently replaceable, being as they were primarily political figureheads there to take credit. The guys who were critical to legionary performance were those (mostly…) NCO-equivalent Centurions who’d come up the ranks and who had the massively expensive life-experience and tutelage it took to create them. You can churn out your ranks of commissioned types with a couple of months of work at some place like Sandhurst, but to get that critical guy you need standing in back of the formation, whose job is to whisper into young Rupert’s ear what he really ought to be doing…? That’s the work (and, not inconsiderable expense) of someone who has 15 to 20 years of hard slogging in the enlisted ranks, moving up from beneath as private to platoon sergeant.
Russia lacks those men. Russia loses at modern war because of that fact. You can’t slough everything off on some academy and shake-and-bake officer corps.
One of the really amazing things about the Soviet system was their incredible hypocrisy when it came to the things you only learn through experience. They had this mentality that the guys coming up the ranks were unimportant, and ignorant slobs unsuitable for much of anything responsible. They put their faith in the school-trained solution every time, and it shows throughout their system: Top-down management with “experts” produced in schools, parachuted into every organization to “run things”. Mostly, into the ground.
Meanwhile, tons of apparent official worship of the proletariat, none of whom were ever entrusted with real power over anything. It was all run by this vast technocratic elite they churned out in schools, who were mostly vast incompetents out in the real world.
Is a sea-borne evacuation in the future? Make some nice targets for the UA.
I make no predictions, but I will point out that a Kerch-strait version of Dunkirk 2.0 has a few minor problems, for the Russians. For one thing, there’s no massive fleet of small privately owned boats to take up and use… The other is, again, down to the utter lack of effective low-level leadership.
At Dunkirk, British Army NCOs marshalled the troops, kept them on the job defending at the rear of the beaches, while others were out ensuring disciplined boarding and equipment destruction. The Russians don’t have those guys; expect the embarkation points in Crimea to be a sh*t-show from day one, and rapid devolvement into chaos and pure Lord of the Flies action. You will not see troops marching up in good order while under fire from the enemy, queueing up to board, and then boarding small vessels in disciplined ranks. It’ll be “every man for himself”, and look like a total cluster-f*ck.
Russian society is very brittle and very badly organized. There’s little to no internal self-discipline, thanks to decades of Communist corrosive influence on values and mores. Add in rampant criminality since day one, and here we are: There are no stoic reserves of Russian discipline and patience left. The first point where they have to demonstrate any of that, it evaporates.
A key tell? All those abandoned vehicles and ammo dumps the Ukrainians have been taking over. If those were UK or US troops, every one of those vehicles and supply points would have been destroyed, rather than be allowed to fall intact into the hands of the enemy. At this point, the Russians are actually the number-one supplier of major arms systems to the Ukrainians, and it’s all down to that utter lack of low-level discipline.
I think we had one or two M1 tanks we had to abandon in Iraq. All of those were destroyed, before being left behind. Who made sure that happened? The NCO cadres, more than anything else.
Kirk, we sure left a lot behind in Afghanistan.
We did the same in South Vietnam. Common denominator? Democrats running the show, both times.
It also wasn’t “left behind” by our military, either. By the time we departed, all that material was in the hands of the locals, who got screwed by Congress and the State Department.
As well, the big decisions like abandoning Bagram were all in the hands of the commissioned types, and they gave the orders. Which, I have it to understand, massively pissed off the senior enlisted who had to salute and drive on with what they knew to be rank and utter folly. They didn’t mutiny.
This time. Next time around, the orders may not be followed.
Time after that, the officers giving those orders might not make it home, either.
First the Nord Stream pipelines, now this.
I guess the real lesson of the last eight months is don’t piss off the Ukrainians, “They’ll be at you and on you like hornets. / And if you are wise you will yield.”
Vlad isn’t wise.
The interesting thing I’ve seen so far is that they still haven’t released anything showing what actually caused this blast.
Which it has in common with the Nordstream pipelines.
From that, you can extrapolate out and try to figure out what those two events have in common, and I think the uncertainty about it all, as well as the lack of outraged Russian counter-reaction might indicate that both events were related to internal Russian infighting between the groups.
For one thing, I don’t see a truck bomb getting onto that bridge. Both ends are under control of the Russians, and the question becomes one of “How’d the Ukrainians build a truck bomb on that scale in Russian territory, conceal it, and then drive it onto the bridge…?” If it was Russians actually behind that, then they’d have had an easier time of pulling that off. Especially if they were FSB or GRU… Or, Wagner.
The remote-controlled boat theory also has that question going for it. That was a bloody great big bomb; how did they conceal something the size of a twenty- or forty-foot container well enough to get it there? I don’t see the characteristic features of a underwater blast that I’ve seen before, soooo…?
A missile attack leads to the question of “Why no follow-up?”, and why the long dwell-time between attacks? I suppose that could indicate supply-chain or production problems for the Ukrainians, but… Who the hell knows? I don’t think it was ATACMS due to the single-use we’re seeing, and the likelihood of political fallout precluding the US from allowing them to be employed.
Whole situation is opaque as hell. I seriously doubt that rail bridge is going to be back in service any time soon, not for full-weight trains. Likewise, the damaged span–It may be in use for passenger cars, but they’re going to be taking serious risks trying to use that for heavy truck traffic before fully evaluating it and repairing it.
One thing people don’t appreciate is how hard it is to do bridge demolition on this scale. There are reasons we developed the small and medium atomic demolition devices, and that’s because when you want to take out a bridge like this, you need weeks of time and a trainload of explosives. Before precision munitions came in, it was highly unlikely you’d be able to hit the damn things with big enough bombs or warheads to actually do damage. Conventional demo took too long, and too many resources, sooo… Nuke the bastards. It was the only way.
An “improvised VBIED” doing this? If that’s what it was, that’s seriously impressive work, and since this was a “first try” effort with it, the question becomes “Who designed the bomb…?” and “Who built it?”. The answer is, someone with experience and background knowledge. Not some happy fool doing it for the first time.
Kinda reminds me of OKC and all the unanswered questions from that. Neither McVeigh or his idiot partner had the background to build that bomb, and “getting it right” on the first try, the way they did? In and of itself, highly suspicious. The answer to that question was never addressed, anywhere. It was just kinda casually ignored, because most people would look at what happened and go “Oh, a bomb…”, never understanding that you don’t pull something like that out of your ass on the first try, without extensive experienced tutelage or a lot of self-taught experimentation. The source of which was never brought up at trial.
Just another shove from the globalists into a nuclear exchange. It’ll serve us right when the missiles fly. We picked this fight starting in 2014 so the globalists could try to get control of Russian energy.
Our leadership is so corrupt and stupid that they think they are in control of events. They are so unaccomplished that they fail to realize that your enemy always gets a vote in what happens. They aren’t beholden to follow your game plan.
Lemme see if I get this right… “We” picked this fight?
Who the f*ck died and made us the people to say that Russia had an absolute right to run the Ukraine? I seem to remember a hell of a lot of Ukrainians standing up and saying “No” to the whole Yanukovych debacle where he wanted to take them back into a de-facto Soviet Union.
And, regardless of whether or not the US and George Soros had anything to do with the idea, there are enough Ukrainians who’re on-board with the whole thing to ensure that it’s a real thing; if they don’t want to be another one of Russia’s exploited colonies, so be it.
Russian conduct and behavior in this war are enough to turn me against them. I could care less about the history, to a degree… All I see is attacks on civilian targets and atrocities, along with rank military incompetence coupled with brute force. I’m not ever going to be on that side, regardless of other merits.
In the end, what you’re arguing is that Russia has some God-given right to dominate and abuse its neighbors, which is what it’s been doing since the days of the Tsar. I say it’s about damn time that the peoples under their subjugation get a chance to live on their own.
Oh, and let us remember a couple of salient facts: The Soviet Union had voting rights in the UN for Ukraine, under the fiction that it was a separate sovereign nation in “federation” with the Soviet Union. Few other Baltic countries as well. Then, there was the treaty signed in Budapest back in 1994, where Russia and the United States both agreed to respect and defend Ukrainian territorial integrity in return for them giving up their nukes. Which they did…
Given that that agreement didn’t include any codicils saying that it was only in effect for as long as it was convenient for Russia, there is a bit of an obligation there. On both sides.
Blaming the people of Ukraine for what was done in the past, and forcing them back under the Russian yoke? That’s a non-starter, from my perspective. F*ck the Russians. Bunch of drunken rapists, from where I’m sitting.
[…] Attacking so fast they won't know what hit them… « Ukraine Hits Train On Crimean Bridge […]
[…] Ukraine had previously hit the Kerch Strait Bridge back in October of 2022. […]