Russia-Ukraine war live: three killed as huge explosion causes key Crimea-Russia road bridge to collapse | Ukraine

Three people were killed after a truck bomb caused a fire and the collapse of a section of a bridge linking Russia with Crimea, Russian officials said.

Russia’s national anti-terrorism committee said the truck bomb set alight seven railway carriages carrying fuel, resulting in a “partial collapse of two sections of the bridge”.

A man and a woman who were riding in a vehicle across the bridge were killed by the explosion and their bodies were recovered, Russia’s investigative committee said. It did not provide details on the third victim.

Meanwhile, Russia’s defence ministry said Russian troops fighting in the Mykolaiv, Kryvyi Rih and Zaporizhzhia regions of southern Ukraine could receive all the supplies they needed via existing land and sea corridors.

Saturday’s explosion on the road-and-rail bridge, which has been used to take Russian personnal and military supplies through the peninsula into other parts of southern Ukraine, brought down sections of road taking traffic in one direction and also damaged railway tracks.

Peter Beaumont

Twelve miles long and taller than the Statue of Liberty, the Kerch bridge project to the occupied Crimean peninsular was the jewel in the crown of Vladimir Putin’s infrastructure projects – described in the Russian media as the “construction of the century”.

When the Russian president opened its road span on 15 May 2018, driving an orange Kamaz truck across the bridge, he boasted of its significance.

“In different historical epochs, even under the tsar priests, people dreamed of building this bridge. Then they returned to this [idea] in the 1930s, the 40s, the 50s. And finally, thanks to your work and your talent, the miracle has happened.”

Heavily defended since the start of Russia’s fulls scale invasion of Ukraine, it was seen as important enough for Moscow to warn of reprisals if the bridge was targeted.

But on Saturday morning, in circumstances that are still unclear, a huge explosion rocked the Kerch bridge, collapsing part of the road carriageway into the Kerch Strait below and setting fire to fuel tankers on a train crossing the second railway span of the bridge.

The enormous significance of the damage to the bridge, obliquely claimed by a senior adviser to the Ukrainian presidency, will become clear in the coming hours and days – not least whether Moscow feels compelled to retaliate for the attack.

The UK has rejected Moscow’s call for a secret ballot in the United Nations general assembly next week on whether to condemn Russia’s move to annex four regions in Ukraine and requested that the 193-member body vote publicly.

Reuters reports that the general assembly is set to vote on a draft resolution that would condemn Russia’s “illegal so-called referenda” and the “attempted illegal annexation”. It also reaffirms the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine, and calls on states not to recognise Russia’s move.

Moscow last week moved to annex the four Ukraine regions – Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia – after staging the “referendums” that have been denounced by Ukraine and its allies as illegal and coercive.

In a letter to UN states earlier this week, Russia’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, lobbied for a secret ballot, arguing that western lobbying meant that “it may be very difficult if positions are expressed publicly”.

Britain’s UN ambassador, Barbara Woodward, said on Friday that the rules of the general assembly were clear that any representative may request a recorded vote.

She wrote to the general assembly president:

To conduct a secret ballot on a general assembly decision would go against decades of precedent and undermine the practices of the world’s most representative deliberative body.

A Ukrainian presidential adviser posted a message on Twitter after conflicting reports of an explosion or fire on Saturday that damaged the bridge connecting the Russian mainland to the occupied Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, calling it “the beginning” but not directly claiming Ukrainian responsibility.

“Everything illegal must be destroyed, everything stolen must be returned to Ukraine, everything occupied by Russia must be expelled,” Mykhailo Podolyak wrote.

The Kerch bridge from Russia to Crimea – a hated symbol of the Kremlin’s occupation of the southern Ukrainian peninsular – has been hit by a massive explosion on the span that carries railway traffic.

Images from the bridge showed a fiercely burning fire engulfing at least two railway carriages from a train on the bridge, accompanied by a vast column of black smoke.

The explosion, which witnesses said could be heard kilometres away, took place around 6am on Saturday while a train was crossing the bridge, although it was not immediately clear what caused it.

Some images appeared to show a second fire at some distance from the main blaze. Later images also appeared to show that part of road bridge that runs parallel with the train tracks had collapsed.

Peter Beaumont in Kyiv has the story:

• A series of explosions shook Kharkiv early on Saturday, sending towering plumes of smoke into the sky and triggering a series of secondary explosions in the eastern Ukraine city. Associated Press reported there were no immediate reports of casualties. The blasts came hours after Russia concentrated attacks on areas it illegally annexed.

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy says Russian officials have begun to “prepare their society” for the possible use of nuclear weapons in the war. The Ukrainian president denied having called for strikes on Russia, urging instead that pre-emptive sanctions be imposed on Moscow, in an interview with the BBC.

• Russia has targeted Zaporizhzhia with explosive-packed “kamikaze drones” for the first time, as the death toll from a missile strike on an apartment building in the city rose to 11. The regional governor, Oleksandr Starukh, said Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones damaged two infrastructure facilities in the city. He said other missiles also struck the city again, injuring one person. The Iranian foreign ministry has denied supplying the drones to Russia.

• The Russian justice ministry has declared one of the country’s most popular rappers to be a “foreign agent”, a designation that has been used to harass Kremlin critics and journalists. Oxxxymiron – real name Miron Fyodorov – was added to a list of foreign agents alongside four journalists and Dmitry Glukhovsky, a prominent writer. The rapper has called the Kremlin’s Ukraine offensive a “catastrophe and a crime”.

• Ukrainian authorities found a mass grave in the recently recaptured eastern town of Lyman in Donetsk and it was unclear yet how many bodies it held, the regional governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said in an online post on Friday. Separately, the Ukrinform news agency cited a senior police official as saying the grave contained 180 bodies.

• The bodies of 534 civilians including 19 children were found in the north-eastern Kharkiv region since Russian troops left, Serhiy Bolvinov of the national police in Kharkiv said. That included 447 bodies found in Izium. He also said investigators had found evidence of 22 sites being used as “torture rooms”.

• Russia has reportedly sacked the commander of its eastern military district, Col Gen Alexander Chaiko, the news outlet RBC has reported. His reported departure marks the latest in a series of top officials to be fired after defeats and humiliations in the war in Ukraine.

• Joe Biden has warned the world could face “Armageddon” if Vladimir Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon to try to win the war in Ukraine. The US president made his most outspoken remarks to date about the threat of nuclear war, saying it was the closest the world had come to nuclear catastrophe for 60 years, “since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis”.

• The US does not have indications that Russia is preparing to imminently use nuclear weapons, the White House said. Asked about Biden’s comments, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said: “He was reinforcing what we have been saying, which is how seriously … we take these threats.”

• The 2022 Nobel peace prize has been awarded to human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Centre for Civil Liberties. Oleksandra Matviychuk, the centre’s head, said on Facebook after the award that Vladimir Putin as well as the Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, and other “war criminals” should face an international tribunal, and Russia should be excluded from the UN security council “for systematic violations of the UN charter”.

• The International Monetary Fund has announced it will provide $1.3bn in emergency aid to Ukraine through its new food crisis assistance program.

• A member of Putin’s inner circle directly confronted the Russian president over mistakes and failings in the war in Ukraine, the Washington Post has reported, citing US intelligence.

• At least five people were killed and as many injured after Ukrainian forces struck a bus while shelling a strategically important bridge in the Russian-controlled part of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, Russia’s Tass news agency has reported.

• The armed forces’ headquarters of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic has claimed to have captured three settlements from Ukrainian forces in Donetsk.

• The office of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said after a call with Putin that the pair discussed the latest developments in Ukraine, and Erdoğan repeated Ankara’s willingness to do its part to peacefully resolve the war.

• The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, has congratulated Putin on his 70th birthday, applauding him for his “distinguished leadership and strong will”. Kim spoke of Putin’s achievements in “building powerful Russia” and said the Russian leader was “enjoying high respects and support from the broad masses of people”.