Russia’s Federal Security Service or FSB claimed that the chief of Ukraine’s military intelligence, Kirill Budanov, orchestrated the attack that partially disabled the bridge and that it has arrested three Ukrainians as well as several other Russian and Armenian citizens it says were involved. The perpetrators, it claimed, disguised explosives as construction materials and shipped them commercially through several regional ports before loading them onto a truck and detonating the explosives on the bridge.
The security service, the main successor to the Soviet KGB, called the incident a “terrorist attack” – consistent with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justification for his unprovoked invasion in February – and claimed to have disrupted at least two others.
“All its organizers and accomplices, including foreign citizens, will be held accountable in accordance with Russian law,” it said.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry and its embassy in Washington, D.C., did not immediately respond to requests for comment. However, several instruments of its government dismissed the FSB claims as fabricated and little more than an attempt to justify Russia’s latest acts of brutality.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture and Information Policy in a thread on Twitter claimed to discredit several pieces of evidence the FSB presented Wednesday, saying they were part of a broader attempt by Moscow to shift away from global condemnation at its subsequent missile strikes on civilian centers in Ukraine, which targeted a children’s playground among other civic and commercial centers.
“All the high-profile ‘solving’ and ‘detentions’ are aimed at maintaining a high degree of anti-Ukrainian hysteria in Russia and making sure that the Ukrainians are seen as enemies and terrorists,” the ministry’s Stratcom Centre UA concluded. “However, these mistakes show the helplessness of Russian fakers.”
It also drew attention to the FSB’s implicit admission that several layers of Russia’s security apparatus failed in order to allow the detonation to take place on one of the country’s most heavily guarded pieces of infrastructure.
Russia launched missile and drone strikes against civilian centers in the Ukrainian capital and other urban centers on Sunday and Monday, killing and wounding dozens. Putin subsequently framed it as retaliation for the explosion on the bridge, which opened in 2019 as one of the most visible symbols of his illegal dominion over the strategic peninsula.
Analysts have similarly pointed to recent Russian attempts to improve its image after its own state-sponsored supporters began questioning the efficacy of the military campaign following stunning battlefield losses.
Army Gen. Sergey Surovikin, known for the brutal tactics against civilians he employed overseeing Russian operations in Syria, has been named the new commander of operations in Ukraine. The timing of that move, combined with its airstrikes over the weekend served as an attempt “to rehabilitate the perception of the Russian Ministry of Defense,” according to a new analysis late Tuesday from the independent think tank Institute for the Study of War.
“Russian milbloggers have recently lauded both the massive wave of strikes on October 10 and Surovikin’s appointment and correlated the two as positive developments for Russian operations in Ukraine,” it writes. “The Russian MoD is evidently invested in repairing its public image, and the informational effects of the October 10 missile strikes and the appointment of Surovikin, a hero in the extremist nationalist Russian information space, are likely intended to cater to the most vocal voices in that space.”
