Russia no longer risks using Crimea bridge to supply troops in Ukraine | Latest Ukraine War News

To sustain the units fighting the war, Russia has recently relied much more on supply routes running across the occupied areas in mainland Ukraine than on the Crimea Bridge, which the Ukrainian Armed Forces have already repeatedly attacked. This was reported by Independent, referring to the data from the Molfar analytical firm. Maxar satellite images, analysts say, show that not a single military freight train passed along the Crimea Bridge railway track for the past three months. It is noted that the use of the bridge significantly decreased after July 17, 2023, when Ukrainian naval drones carrying explosives attacked it, blowing up a section of the roadway and the railway track. According to the head of the Security Service of Ukraine, Vasyl Maliuk, until recently, Russia used to have more than 40 trains carrying weapons run along the bridge on a daily basis. Now traffic has reduced to four passenger and one freight train per day, he clarified. At the same time, there is a surge in cargo shipments through Taman of Russia’s Krasnodar Territory. According to analysts, Ukraine should rationally use Western weapons and concentrate strikes on the route through Melitopol, Berdyansk, and Mariupol, where Russia is now laying new railway lines to connect these occupied regions with Crimea and Russia’s mainland. As the publication suggests, the new railway line, which runs from Yakymivka of the Melitopol district to Berdiansk and Mariupol and farther to Rostov, will likely be used by the Russian army for a new offensive, which may kick off this summer. The railway route consists of 63 km of new tracks and about 140 km of restored ones. The invaders want to complete the construction by the end of the year, so that the new network will connect more districts of the temporarily occupied part of Donetsk region. As reported earlier, the spokesman for the Ukrainian Naval Forces, Captain 3rd rank Dmytro Pletenchuk, said that the illegally built Crimea bridge will be destroyed and that the only question is the degree of the destruction.