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By Isabel van Brugen
News Reporter
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A Ukrainian missile strike has blown a hole in a bridge connecting Russian-occupied parts of the Kherson region with annexed Crimea, officials said on Thursday morning.
Vladimir Saldo, who was appointed by the Kremlin to lead Ukraine's southern Kherson region after it was seized following Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion, said Kyiv's forces had attacked attacked bridges on the administrative border between the Kherson region and Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014.
The annexed region has several bridges that connect it to Kherson via the Chonhar peninsula.
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"The criminal Kyiv regime committed a barbarous shelling of civilian facilities—bridges on the administrative border between the Kherson region and Crimea near Chonhar," he wrote on his Telegram channel, sharing images of the strikes.
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Saldo said authorities believe British Storm Shadow missiles were used in the strikes.
"The road surface on the bridges was damaged. There are no casualties," he added.
A tweet from geopolitical analyst Michael Horowitz shows a large hole in the road surface of a bridge.
Crimea's governor, Sergey Aksyonov, said the Chonhar bridge was struck overnight on Thursday.
Ukraine has not commented on the reports of strikes on bridges between the Kherson region and Crimea.
Newsweek has contacted the foreign minstries of Ukraine and Russia for comment via email.
The Chonhar bridge, known as "the gate to Crimea", is a key link connecting the peninsula with mainland Ukraine.
In a Telegram post on Thursday, a Russian military blogger explained the significance of the reported strike on the bridge.
"The first thing to understand this is now just a strike on a bridge, it is a strike on a land corridor. The strike was serious and it is possible that it will happen again—70 percent of all military and civilian traffic went through Chonhar," the blogger wrote on Telegram channel Zhivov.
"The second thing that has now become obvious is that we are very poorly protected from attacks by Storm Shadow missiles, and previous arrivals [missile attacks] in Genichesk [played a role] in breaking through our air defenses in the north of Crimea," the military blogger continued.
On May 11, the U.K. became the first country to supply Ukraine with long-range cruise missiles when it provided the Storm Shadows. According to Fabian Hoffmann, a missile technology expert, they have the potential to strike the Kerch Strait Bridge—Russia's sole link to Crimea, which Ukraine hopes to recapture in a counteroffensive.
Ukraine has said that, so far, the Storm Shadow missiles have hit all of their Russian targets.
"The logistics of supplying new regions after the attack of the bridge will seriously become more complicated, and the risk of repeated arrivals will scare many away from attempting to cross," Zhivov wrote.
"In general, the situation is difficult. In such cases, the enemy must be dealt a disproportionately strong blow to break the habit of attacking his own infrastructure, but a hunch tells us that we will refrain," the post concluded.
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Update 06/22/23 at 4:13 a.m. ET: This article was updated with additional background information.
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