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Russia knows Putin’s Crimean Bridge is “doomed,” a Ukrainian official told The Economist.
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Dmitry Pletenchuk said Russia is using a new railway line because it knows the bridge is in trouble.
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Ukraine has long threatened to destroy the bridge and could use US-supplied long-range ATACMS.
Russia knows its Crimean bridge is doomed, forcing the country to rely on a new railway line for its military, a Ukrainian official said.
Dmitry Pletenchuk, a spokesman for Ukraine’s southern military command, made the statement to The Economist on Sunday.
It came after the US delivered long-range ATACMS to Ukraine, putting higher-value targets, including the Kerch Bridge in Crimea, in Ukraine’s crosshairs.
The new Army Tactical Missile Systems have a range of 300 kilometers.
Russia stopped using the Kerch Bridge, which connects Russia to occupied Crimea by rail and road, for the transport of military equipment sometime between February and mid-April, experts from the open-source intelligence organization Molfar said last month based on satellite images.
Instead, Russia has upgraded a railway line stretching from the Russian city of Rostov, along the Sea of Azov, through the occupied Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Berdiansk, and ending in Crimea, according to The Economist.
“The railway line along the land corridor is an acknowledgment on the part of the Russian occupiers that the Crimean Bridge is doomed,” Pletenchuk told the newspaper.
“They are looking for a way to hedge their bets because they are aware that sooner or later they will have a problem,” he added.
Long-range ATACMS could be a gamechanger in Ukraine’s quest to retake Crimea, The Economist reported.
Russia illegally annexed the peninsula in 2014.
Ukrainian forces used a long-range ATACMS to devastating effect in an attack that killed more than a hundred Russian soldiers in Luhansk last month, according to OSINT and military analysts.
And they have the potential to make Crimea “militarily worthless” to Russia, Philip Karber, a military analyst with expertise on Ukraine, told Radio Free Europe in April.
Ukraine has long been threatening to make the Crimean Bridge unusable.
Last October, the British Ministry of Defense said the bridge would pose a “significant security burden” to Russia in the future. And Oleksii Neizhpapa, the commander of the Ukrainian Navy, has pledged to destroy the ship by the end of this year.
Read the original article on Business Insider
