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Putin blames Kyiv for Crimean Bridge blast
Summary
A retrospective on 9 October 2022, when the Russian president named Ukraine's security service as responsible for the explosion on the Crimean Bridge.
What did Moscow say about the Crimean Bridge explosion on 9 October 2022? Russian president Vladimir Putin formally accused Ukraine, and specifically the Security Service of Ukraine, of being behind the blast, which killed three people and partially destroyed part of the bridge. He called the explosion an act of terrorism.
The accusation came in the days after a rapid sequence of political steps in Moscow. On 4 October 2022, the Federation Council of Russia unanimously approved the annexation of Ukraine's Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. The documents were then left for final signing by Putin.
On 5 October 2022, Putin signed the law formally annexing the Donetsk People's Republic, the Luhansk People's Republic, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia into Russia.
A charge placed on a named agency
By 9 October 2022, then, the Russian leadership had completed its formal annexation steps within a week. It then turned to the bridge explosion and assigned responsibility to a specific Ukrainian institution rather than to Ukraine in general.
The naming of the Security Service of Ukraine gave the accusation a precise target, and the description of the blast as terrorism set the terms in which Putin chose to present it. The explosion's toll, three dead and part of the bridge destroyed, formed the basis of that public charge.
