The Daily - A Bridge, a Bomb and Putin’s Revenge

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

Just before the sun came up on Saturday on the Kerch Strait Bridge, a strategically and symbolically important link between Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, a bomb detonated, creating a giant fireball.But Ukrainian elation about the explosion quickly turned into concern about how Russia would respond. And in the days since, Moscow’s retaliation has been to pound Ukrainian cities with missiles in the most sweeping rocket assault since the start of the war.Guest: Michael Schwirtz, an investigative reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: President Vladimir V. Putin vowed that more strikes would follow if Russian targets were hit again.The hail of missiles also seemed intended to appease the hard-liners in Russia who are furious with the humiliating setbacks on the battlefield.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. Over the past few days, Russian missiles have slammed into Ukrainian cities in the most sweeping attack since the start of the war. since the start of the war. Today, I talk to my colleague Michael Schwartz about what prompted the strikes and what they tell us about Russia's narrowing options. It's Wednesday, October 12th. So, Mike, we've been seeing all of this news coming out of Ukraine over the past couple of days.

Lots of bombings and many, many people dead. Tell us what happened. When did it all begin? It all started at about 6 a.m. on Saturday. You're looking at a vital bridge for Russia connecting mainland Russia to Crimea. And we're learning this morning that there has been an explosion on that bridge. It was just before the sun came up and on a bridge called the Crimean Bridge linking Russia to the Crimean Peninsula, this massive fireball erupted. A truck exploded on the road section of the Crimea Bridge from

the side of the Taman Peninsula. This set seven fuel tanks of a train traveling in the direction of Crimea on fire. As a result, two road sections have partially collapsed. This huge sparking ball of flames that then ignited a passing fuel train that began to blow up and burn on a parallel railroad track to the bridge. He saw several cars get engulfed in this fireball. Russian officials say at least three people were killed in that blast. And ultimately, a large chunk of this bridge just fell into the sea.

Oh. And I woke up to this, to a number of notifications on my phone. It was very clear that this was a very, very, very big deal. These astonishing images will reverberate across Russia. A sign, if ever there was one, that his special military operation is having unintended consequences. And why exactly was it such a big deal? Why is this bridge so important? There are two main reasons why the bridge is significant.

One, it is the sole linkage between Russian territory and Crimea. It is crucial for Russia's military effort in southern Ukraine. It is the primary supply route for tanks, for heavy artillery, for weapons and fuel that Russia is sending into Crimea. And this equipment is supplying troops that are fighting what is an increasingly active counteroffensive by Ukrainian troops in southern Ukraine. Got it. And any disruption to this supply line could have a profound effect on Russia's ability to continue fighting this war. But there's also a major symbolic importance for this bridge. This bridge was opened by Vladimir Putin,

Russia's president, in 2018 to great fanfare. He drove a truck across the bridge himself at the opening. This for Vladimir Putin is a symbol of one of his greatest achievements. That is the seizure of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014. Right. This was Putin's really kind of original foray into Ukraine, right? In 2014, this was the first place that he seized. Right. It was the first domino in this series that have fallen, that have basically touched off the chain of events that led us to this war

that Russia is currently fighting in Ukraine. And Putin has always seen Crimea as this symbol of what was lost to Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed. And he has long sought to regain it. People have been trying to build a bridge linking Russian territory to Crimea for at least 100 years. It cost billions of dollars to build this bridge. And this was this symbol for Putin

that he had done it, that he had achieved this goal of many Russian nationalists of claiming the Crimean Peninsula for Russia. So this strategic bridge, which also happens to have a lot of symbolic value for Putin and for Russia, is smashed. Right. And do we know anything about who coordinated it? I mean, who did this? Suspicions obviously fell immediately on Ukraine. Ukrainian officials have been telegraphing for months now that the bridge was a target. They've described it as an illegally constructed

part of Russia's illegal annexation of Ukraine. And they have been saying over and over again publicly that this bridge represented a target. To this day, the Ukrainian government has not taken responsibility for blowing up this bridge. But a senior Ukrainian official confirmed that it was Ukrainians intelligence services who were behind it. As described to me, they used, it was essentially a fertilizer bomb packed in the back of a semi truck that was then driven onto the bridge and detonated. And do we know who drove it? We don't. We don't. I've been told that the driver very likely died. And one of the great and tantalizing mysteries of this case so far is whether the driver knew that he was driving to his death

and had been aware that this was the mission or that the Ukrainian intelligence services had duped an unwitting innocent and had him drive it over to the bridge and then detonated it, costing his life in the process. So there are, it sounds like a fair amount of unknowns, but it seems pretty likely that Ukraine really was behind this attack. No Ukrainian official has denied to me in private that Ukraine carried out this attack. And high-level Ukrainian officials immediately went out in public and celebrated the explosion on the bridge. Volodymyr Zelensky, in his speech that night, praised the explosion, said it was a good day for Ukraine. The Ukrainian Postal Service even set up a large mock-up of a stamp that showed the

bridge with fire and explosions all around it that Ukrainians were taking selfies in front of in Kiev on Saturday, the day of the explosion. And another thing about this explosion that's interesting is the timing. It happened just a day after Vladimir Putin celebrated his 70th birthday. In fact, I was talking to a senior military official about the bombing later that day, and he had mentioned to me that it wasn't every day that somebody would get such an expensive gift for their birthday.

And so I think that this attack had been intentionally planned to fall around Vladimir Putin's birthday. And there's very little doubt that Ukraine was behind this and that they were extremely pleased about it. But over all of this joy over the loss of the bridge, there were creeping concerns, particularly as you started to see Russian officials and these very influential, hardline military bloggers start to call for revenge.

These people were calling for blood. And they were saying that if Russia did not respond to this affront in a very serious and some were even saying vicious way, then Russia would look weak and it would lead Russia down the road to defeat. look weak and it would lead Russia down the road to defeat. And so very quickly, attention, I think, turned from the elation over the bridge to concerns about how Russia might respond to this attack. We'll be right back. So this bridge that connects Russia to Crimea was attacked and the Ukrainians were celebrating, but also kind of anxiously awaiting Russia's response, right? How did Russia respond?

The response came almost exactly two days after the attack on the bridge. It started for me when I heard a loud explosion at about 8 a.m. that shook the hotel room where I was staying in Kiev. I ran to the window and I could see that the pigeons had taken off from the windowsill. ran to the window and I could see that the pigeons had taken off from the window sill. Air raid sirens started going and I grabbed my stuff and ran out to try and find where the rocket had hit. It was absolute carnage. A rocket had hit right in the center of a busy intersection. Half a dozen cars were incinerated. There was at least one body on the street that had already been covered by a gold foil blanket. There was firefighters and police running around as well as soldiers with machine guns. It was real chaos for a moment.

And Kiev had not been hit like this since the very, very beginning of the war. There had not been strikes on the center of Kiev. And so I go about my work interviewing emergency workers, interviewing people who were standing there on the scene. And I was interviewing an individual who was in his car at the intersection when the rocket hit, and his car had kind of caved in on top of him and he was able to get out. And in the middle of that interview, that's when the other strikes started to hit. You could hear the rocket kind of fly over us and slam into buildings close by in an incredibly loud sound, which indicated that it was right in the middle of town. I continued to interview, but then very quickly, in quick succession, two more strikes

came in very loud, sending people kind of fleeing for cover. And it was at that point that it was very, very clear that Kyiv was under attack. And look at the map tonight, multiple cities targeted across Ukraine. And I remember at one point looking at my phone and seeing a bunch of alerts. Also strikes on other cities, including Lviv in the west. Saying Lviv had been struck. And again overnight in Zaporizhia. Zaporizhia had been struck. Nikolaev had been struck.

Dnipro in central Ukraine. And in the last... Dnipro had been struck. All of these cities. The gloves came off in a coordinated assault across at least 10 cities. And it became immediately clear that these attacks were happening all over the country. And this was a massive bombardment. What did you think at that moment?

It was clear to me that this was the response that people had been waiting for. These rockets were being directed at places where people were congregating, at apartment buildings, at busy intersections. And if there was any doubt that it was revenge, Vladimir Putin himself went on TV a few hours later and described it as revenge. went on TV a few hours later and described it as revenge. He described the attack on the bridge as a terrorist act and threatened to keep carrying out attacks like this in the future if Ukraine continued to do similar operations. And what's been the overall impact of this revenge, this retaliation? There have been about 20 deaths. Over 100 people

have been injured in these attacks. So that's the most immediate impact. Some of these strikes did hit critical infrastructure like power plants. And so there have been these rolling blackouts across the country. Some cities partially or fully have been without power. So that's the great fear that these sorts of attacks could continue. And it could be a very long and hard winter for the Ukrainian people. But from a strategic standpoint, it's really hard to judge. The Russian military launched nearly 100 rockets and the so-called kamikaze drones, which are these drones that are meant to fly and blow up like a missile.

Not a single one hit a military target, according to Ukrainian officials. So lots of damage to civilian targets, but the military is effectively kind of unscathed. Exactly. And if the goal of this was to wear down the resolve of the Ukrainian people, it might have had the opposite effect. The individuals that I talked to yesterday seemed to be only emboldened by these attacks. I don't know how many people I talked to yesterday who insisted that victory was at hand and this was a sign of weakness coming from Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin and Russia. a sign of weakness coming from Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin and Russia, though it's yet to be seen if these sorts of attacks continue how that might affect the resolve of Ukrainians and their continued desire to pursue this war. So it's not clear whether this achieved any of Putin's other than satisfying the hardline calls in his own country to seek revenge for this attack on the bridge. But given all of that, where does this really leave us in terms of the war?

I mean, where are we in this moment then? It's hard to say whether this attack, these series of attacks, represents a new phase of the war or whether it's an isolated incident that Russia was planning to carry out just in response to the bridge. and persistently carry out these kinds of attacks on civilian infrastructure, it means that there's some acknowledgement in the Kremlin that they are not winning on the battlefield and that perhaps they can't at this moment win on the battlefield and they have to adopt a new strategy. And the strategy appears to be meant to make life as uncomfortable as possible for the Ukrainians.

You know, if this bombing campaign is sustained, how long can these Ukrainians who remain, you know, the morale is high and they remain dedicated to this fight, how long can they sustain this? Before this bombing campaign, in parts of Ukraine, particularly in the West, but even in Kyiv, life had begun to resemble the normal. Just the day before these attacks on Monday, I was at a dinner party at a friend's apartment in central Kyiv meeting their new baby, right? People have returned to Kyiv to get back to their normal lives. If Putin begins and the Kremlin begins to launch a steady stream of these kinds of attacks, that disrupts any sense of normalcy people might have created. Yeah. They're back to the place where they can't plan. They can't really kind of have lives. Where they're living underground. We saw the metro in Kiev this weekend open again as a shelter. We haven't seen that since March. And

not only that, there are economic considerations to take into account. How long can Ukraine as a state continue to pump millions of dollars, albeit with the help of Western countries, but pump millions of dollars a day into this warfighting effort while no economic activity is happening, while no investment is happening, and it'll make it much harder to sustain this war. And maybe he's counting on that. So people in Kyiv are hiding in the subways for the first time since March. But it also sounds like this is a moment where Russia is starting to look a bit desperate. Exactly. I mean, if you look at the battlefield, is starting to look a bit desperate.

Exactly. I mean, if you look at the battlefield, Ukraine remains on the offensive in the south and the east. Russia is desperately trying to hold onto territory that it took in the first months of this war. And so all the missiles that they lobbed at Ukrainian cities in the last two days have had no effect on changing that and even if you look at the attacks that they carried out they mess these up they use the wrong kinds of weapons in some cases you're also not seeing

them hit the things that they want to hit. There's this bridge in the center of Kiev. It's a tourist attraction. It's this pedestrian bridge that's made of steel and glass. And it was clear this was a target. They fired a rocket at it, sort of like a bridge for a bridge. The Ukrainians blew up our bridge, so we're going to blow up their bridge. So we're going to blow up their bridge. They couldn't take this bridge down, a skinny, narrow glass and steel pedestrian bridge. And so what all this amounts to is it just seems that Russia is in a lot of trouble and it just can't figure out a way to get out of it. They've tried to change their strategy.

They've fallen back. They've regrouped. Nothing has worked. And we're going into the winter months. Ukraine still has the advantage. Ukraine's morale is high. Ukraine is on the offensive. I just don't see at this point how Russia turns this around. Mike, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. On Tuesday, leaders of the G7 countries convened an emergency virtual meeting and pledged, quote, undeterred and steadfast financial and military support for Ukraine. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky

asked the leaders, including President Biden, for more modern air defense systems to protect against Russian attacks. His request is expected to be considered at a gathering of U.S. and allied defense ministers on Wednesday. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today.

President Biden called on the resignation of three L.A. City Council members after an audio recording leaked of one of them using racist language to describe a fellow council member's Black child. The councilwoman who made the remarks, Nuri Martinez, is Latina and the council president. She also used offensive language to describe indigenous immigrants from Mexico. On Monday, she stepped down as council president, but stopped short of resigning from the council altogether. All three members apologized, but none resigned from their seats. The recording, which was made last year, drew scores of angry protesters who disrupted the council meeting. The episode exposed painful racial fault lines in the heavily democratic city.

And the International Monetary Fund downgraded its global growth projection for next year, saying that the world economy would face a recession in 2023 if policymakers failed to address inflation. The assessment, given in the organization's closely watched Economic Outlook report, says, quote, the worst is yet to come. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Nina Feldman, Diana Nguyen, and Moosh Zady. It was edited by John Ketchum, Liz O'Balin, and Lisa Chow. Contains original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, and Rowan Nemisto. And was engineered by Corey Schruppel. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.