Moscow linked the incident to a bomb on a truck, but a detailed analysis of the footage calls into question.
What is known about what caused the dramatic explosion last Saturday (8/10) on the Kerch bridge connecting Russia to Crimea? There are many theories, not all of them very convincing.
Russia quickly stated that it was a bomb on a truck, but did not name the culprits.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Ukraine’s celebration of the incident showed it was “terrorist” – but did not directly blame Kiev for the incident.
Security camera footage posted on social media shows a truck that allegedly came from Krasnodar, Russia, an hour away from the bridge at the time of the explosion, crossed the bridge.
Russian officials said the vehicle belonged to 25-year-old Samir Yusubov and that the driver was a relative of Makhir Yusubov.
But a detailed analysis of the footage shows that the truck may have had nothing to do with the explosion.
Scenes show a large fireball just behind and beside the truck climbing the elevated portion of the bridge.
The speed with which the truck bomb theory is spreading in Russian circles raises doubts. This suggests that the Kremlin preferred the idea of an act of terrorism to the more alarming possibility: it was an audacious act of sabotage by Ukraine.
“I’ve seen a lot of explosive devices for large vehicles. It doesn’t look like that here,” a former member of the British Armed Forces specializing in explosives told the BBC.
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A more plausible explanation, he says, was a large explosion under the bridge – possibly triggered by explosives carried by a seaplane.
“Bridges are generally designed to withstand air load, as well as a certain amount of weight from the sides due to wind,” adds the former British officer. “They weren’t usually designed to withstand bottom-up loading. I think that was abused on offense.”
Some observers noticed that in one of the security camera videos, seconds before the explosion, something resembling waves from a small boat appeared near one of the pillars of the bridge.
What kind of boat could it be?
Images circulating on Russian social media on September 21 showed a mysterious unmanned boat appearing off the shores of the Russian naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea.
It looked like a large boat covered with senors and a periscope-like device. According to local media reports, the ship was taken to sea and exploded.
“Part of an unmanned vehicle was discovered,” said the pro-Russian governor of Sevastopol at the time. “After the assessment, the device was destroyed by an explosion at sea. No one was injured.”
This was not the first report to suggest that Ukraine has access to such classified equipment.
“There are well-founded reports that the Ukrainians are using remote-controlled vehicles for both surveillance and attack,” the British explosives expert told the BBC.
If Ukraine succeeded in attacking the Kerch Bridge in this way, hundreds of kilometers from the area still under Ukrainian government control, then this is one of the most ambitious operations Kiev has ever undertaken in warfare.
But no one agrees with the theory, except for some unofficial reports in the Ukrainian capital.
Indeed, in a speech on Saturday night, Mykhailo Podolyak, chief of staff of President Volodymyr Zelensky, endorsed the Russian truck bomb theory and said that the explosion was the result of conflict between different wings of the Russian security forces.
“Answers must be sought in Russia,” he said. “This (explosion) is a concrete manifestation of disagreements between the FSB (Russian domestic intelligence service), special military agents, on the one hand, and officials of the Ministry of Defense and the Russian Federation, on the other.”
Could Podolia know something that no one else does? Or is he roaming Moscow over recent Russian battlefield losses in Ukraine?
So far unknown.
As in previous episodes—including the sinking of Moscow, a key Russian fleet ship in the Black Sea, and the mysterious attack that devastated a Russian airbase in Crimea in August—Kyiv chose to let theories circulate unanswered.
This is part of a successful information campaign run by Ukraine alongside the military effort since the start of the war in February. So far, the campaign seems to have paid off.
Text originally published at https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-63194582
source: Noticias
