The Crimea bridge explosion prompts calls for revenge from Russian hard-liners.
Russian hard-liners reacted with surprise and frustration to the calamitous explosion on the Kerch Strait Bridge on Saturday, calling yet again for Russia to escalate its attacks on Ukraine.
President Vladimir V. Putin has faced heightened pressure in recent weeks with harsh criticism of military leaders from some of his closest, hawkish allies, and the explosion on the bridge was likely to add to accusations of incompetency swirling around the Kremlin’s entire Ukraine war effort.
Ukrainian officials have hinted that Ukraine was responsible for Saturday’s explosion.
Aleksandr Kots, a war correspondent for the Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, wrote on Telegram that disabling the bridge bodes ill for Moscow’s already troubled efforts to hold onto territory in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine — and likely foreshadowed a future attack on Crimea itself.
He described the “consistency” that Ukraine was showing in the war as “enviable” and called for Russia to “hammer Ukraine into the 18th century, without meaningless reflection on how this will affect the civilian population.”
Many commentators demanded that Russia destroy Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure and the transportation systems used to import Western armaments.
Another war correspondent, Evgeny Poddubny, writing for the state RT outlet, said that nobody in the Ukrainian leadership seemed to fear Russia anymore.
“The enemy has stopped being afraid, and this circumstance needs to be corrected promptly,” he wrote in RT’s Telegram channel. “Commanders of formations, heads of intelligence agencies, politicians of the Kyiv criminal regime sleep peacefully, wake up without a headache and in a good mood, without a sense of inevitability of punishment for crimes committed.”
Russia should also revive Mr. Putin’s formula for winning the Chechen war more than two decades ago when he vowed to pursue adversaries relentlessly — and even “waste them in the outhouse,” the post said.
At least at first, the attack did not incite more of the intense criticism focused in recent weeks on the Defense Ministry and the minister himself, Sergei K. Shoigu.
But the $7 billion, 12-mile-long bridge was a symbolic and engineering triumph for Mr. Putin. Completed in 2018, it literally cemented Russia’s claim to make Crimea part of its territory. Damaging it, as some commentators noted, raised questions about that control — which will most likely force the president to respond in some way.
The official government reaction was to label the explosion on the bridge a “terrorist attack” and to open an official inquiry.
Rybar, a Telegram news and commentary channel with nearly one million followers but whose origins are unclear, urged against criticism of the leadership in response to the blast, saying that such outpourings had been doing “more harm than good.”
The outlet did echo the calls, however, for Russia to destroy Ukraine’s infrastructure.
“We will not say how inaction in this situation will turn out,” Rybar said. “Let’s ask the question: If this is not a reason for really decisive measures, then what is it at all? People demand revenge.”
Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.
— Neil MacFarquhar
