HOW DOES THE KERCH BRIDGE BLOW?
October 10, 2022 -Durt Fibo

On Saturday, October 8, a section of the the Kerch bridge linking mainland Russia to Crimea exploded at 6:00 in the morning. Multiple videos of the moment indicate that the source of the blast was a single fuel truck, which exploded just as a train also carrying fuel was crossing rail lines along the bridge.

As a major attack on both Russia prestige and supply lines –and a frighteningly sudden unlinking of Russia from its colonized land– Putin denounced the act as “terrorism” (as though such a concept was new in the war on Ukraine), and most Ukrainians celebrated it like a geyser of morale reaching the heavens.

Ukrainian popular humor and official taunting has not, however fully explained the origin or the mechanics of the incident. But a deeper look into the Russian side of things might be worth consideration.

In what the world assumes was retaliation, Russia immediately hurled missile strikes at at least 10 Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv and Lviv, using whatever munitions they still possess, meaning non-precision ‘clumsy’ armaments bound to land on anything from cows to apartment complexes.

Not-so-coincidentally, also On October 8th, Gen. Sergei Surovikin was appointed commander of all Russian forces in Ukraine. Surovikin was was already the commanding officer of Southern Military District, yet his elevation to Lord of War at the time of the Kerch attack conjures a clearer image of what Putin has always represented.

Most political powermen are calculating but bereft of imagination. In the summer of 1999, as a relatively ignored Vladimir Putin settled into the throne he’d been granted by Boris Yeltsin in a mutual exchange of non-prosecution promises, an explosion killed 64 people in the Russian border guard garrison of Buynaksk , near Chechnya. Within the next two weeks, three more bombs devastated residential apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk, killing hundreds altogether.

Despite the many and vocal doubts regarding the actual perpetrators, which have persisted to this day and have seen prominent journalists poisoned and murdered for investigating the bombings (among plenty of other incriminating discoveries, three FSB officers were arrested for one of those bombings) , the new KGB-raised President Putin instantly told the Russian people that Chechens were responsible, and ignited the Second Chechen War, which cemented his ‘moral’ authority in the eyes of Russians, and cemented the highways of political authority, which all eventually led to his palace door.

Surovikin served in that war to create the Putinized Russia we have now. He’d begun his career as a speznatz (in Afghanistan) and barreled through a series of crimes of brutality against his own colleagues until he was assigned to the annihilation of Chechnya. Later, in Syria, he perfected his technique of flattening inhabited urban centers, for which he was promoted to General of the Army.

Since October 8th, Russian attacks on cities, towns, power plants and public open spaces have increased at a deafening and paralyzing rate. Iranian drones have entered the skies to fill whatever blue gaps remained. Surovikin, referred to in Russian media as “General Armageddon”, has reasserted his strategic brilliance of targeting and exterminating civilian life, and Vladimir Putin might very well have reverted to the equally brute thinking that first made him a Russian Cesar…or Czar, as it is transliterated from Cyrillic.