The rail bridge has two tracks going each way, and they ran a test 15-car train on the other span. I have a civil engineer/bridge inspector friend who thinks it’s probably unwise to use the rail bridge at all, as the fire has almost certainly weakened the structure through spalling. But Russia doesn’t have a lot of options.
The destroyed train hasn’t been cleared yet.
They’ve opened up the surviving lane for traffic. “It’s been said that the road span can handle 20 cars an hour and has a weight capacity of 3.5 tons.” That’s rural mail route capacity, not “support a major front in a war” capacity.
Russia is trying to repair the bridge.
They’re using passenger-only ferries to cross, but the run rate is so low they may only have one ferry in service.
Peter Zeihan says it’s potentially a turning point in the war:
“By far the most significant development of the war to date.” I would say that the failure to take Hostomel Airport in the opening phases of the war was bigger, as that meant Russia’s high risk/high reward decapitation strike had failed.
“The Kerch bridge is the only large-scale rail connection between mainland Russia and the Crimean peninsula, which is home to about two and a half million people.”
All other rail lines are under threat of Ukrainian artillery.
He reiterates that everything in Russia runs on rail, as they never built a modern road network in most of the country.
“With Kerch being the only real connection, it is the primary primary way that the Russians Supply Crimea in the southwestern front with not just troops and equipment, but with food and fuel.”
He estimates the bridge spans couldn’t be repaired without several months of work.
“Now that the Ukrainians know it can be done, you can bet they’re going to try to hit other parts of it to make sure the thing stays offline.”
“For the first time we have a path forward for the Ukrainians here to win that is not long and windy.”
Russia finally has a problem it can’t just shove bodies at. “You don’t throw a half a million people at logistics. This is something where either you have the connections or you don’t.”
Russian troops in Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Crimea are “suddenly on their own.”
They can now only supply those regions in two ways. “One is by truck, and we know that because of all the Javelins that have been put into Ukraine, and all the RPGs, that the Russians are almost out of their entire military tactical truck fleet, and they’ve started using city buses and Scooby-Doo vans, and those just can’t take the volume of stuff that an active frontline needs.”
The second way is by ship, and if they can’t supply anti-ship missiles, then Ukrainians can Muscova “every single cargo ship that the Russians try to bring in.”
“Losing cargo ships in that volume, losing trucks and buses in that volume, is hollowing out the entirety of the Russian internal transport system. This is the sort of thing that if you bleed this fast, it takes a decade to recover from, and in a war zone that is not going to happen.”
And sanctions make everything harder.
There still seems to be some confusion over just what blew up the bridge. While truck bomb is still the most widely accepted theory, supposedly Russia scans all trucks before the enter the bridge. And Suchomimus has a video up showing something in the water just before the blast (what isn’t clear).
Finally, there are persistent reports of arrests of military personnel in Moscow. But the primary source for these reports seems to be Ukrainian, so several grains of salt are probably in order.
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23 Responses to “Kerch Strait Bridge Update: Russia’s Still Using It”
There are things that militate against this being Ukrainian, no matter what attack technique was utilized. First off, if it was a truck? It came from Russia, got through the inspection, and then detonated nearly perfectly. If it was a sea-based attack, it was from the Sea of Azov direction, and that is basically a Russian lake at the moment. A missile? If the Ukrainians have missiles capable of hitting the bridge, why didn’t they do it before and why was there only the single strike?
Given everything going on around this, I’d be willing to entertain all sorts of “unlikely” scenarios, up to and including that the attack was performed by Russia or factions within it. It could very well be that what we’re seeing played out here in front of the world is factional infighting between parts of the Russian kakistocracy, for entirely opaque reasons. Same with Nordstream. It isn’t outside the realm of possibility that one or both of these attacks are meant to discredit Putin or factions within the Russian government, as a means to justify going to the negotiating table or to escalate to nukes…
With the Russians, you never know. You think you understand what they see as the rational self-interested course of action, and then they do something entirely different and apparently against their own interest. The logic escapes outsiders, and probably confuses the sh*t out of the people inside the system, as well. Did anyone ever figure out why Stalin chose to ally himself with Hitler, enabling the invasion of Western Europe? Was that a “good idea”?
I will say that for an improvised bomb, they did an incredible amount of damage. Way more than you can generally expect from even a planned demolition of a target like this, which would normally take days or weeks and tons of explosives unless the bridge was designed with prechambered detonation in mind. The fact that the Russians are actually running trains over that heat-stressed railway bridge that they dumped tons of cold seawater on…? That’s eye-wateringly ill-judged, and I’d never in a million years ever even suggest such a course of action. Those bridge spans are now a major rail accident waiting to happen…
Sane people would be shutting that bridge down for weeks of careful inspection and testing. Apparently, the Russians aren’t sane…
Additionally, repair efforts will offer nice target opportunities for the UA artillery and Special Operations folks. Bet the rail bridge drops after any really significant usage. Even with some of the roadway open, it’s still a squeeze on resupply efforts.
Big Red will conduct terror bombardments of Ukrainian civilians and non-military facilities. Terror bombing of civilian targets wasn’t as helpful to the Allied war effort as had been hoped. The Germans held out until Allied infantry and tanks occupied every square mile of the Reich. Took two atom bombs to get Japan’s attention.
Russian collapse won’t happen quickly until it does.
3.5 ton weight capacity? That’s not even an F250 carrying a full cargo load, and certainly not a trailer. That’s not even a rural mail route, because Farmer John can drive his F250 loaded with hay bales in the bed and towing a trailer holding 4 cows down a rural mail route.
(F250 curb weight is about 2.5 tons, with a cargo capability of around 2 tons, depending on year and exact variant)
As a person who studied and did bridge demolition for 25 years, I’m going to have to go on record as saying that whoever did this either knew precisely what they were doing, or they got incredibly lucky. Big bridges are absolutely not easy targets–They’re why we developed the Small Atomic Demolition Munition and its sibling, the MADM. You want to even disable a bridge the size of the one at Kerch, you’re talking about needing time, explosives, and access that really militate against doing it casually. Typically, a bridge on this scale requires weeks of prep and tons of explosives. The planned demolition of the Remagen bridge was months in planning and preparation–And, when the time came? It failed.
So, whoever did this? I’m impressed. I’m also completely unable to say for certain how it was done. Without seeing the submerged parts of the bridge deck, I can’t tell for sure what happened. I see what looks like scorch marks on the top of the deck, but…?
Hell, who the hell really knows? Maybe this was a freakin’ accident, and that truck was hauling Soviet-era munitions around, and just happened to pop at just the right moment…
Alternatively, maybe a meteorite?
I honestly just don’t see the Ukrainians being able to pull off putting together a truck bomb in Russian territory, or managing to get a remote-controlled vessel at it through the Azov Sea. Missiles? Maybe. I wish I could remember how much signature an ATACMS made before impact; I vaguely remember that there was very little to see, but I’m also remembering something about an ionized trail under some atmospheric conditions. The surveillance footage I’ve seen of the site before the blast is pretty inconclusive.
Ah, well… It’s like Nordstream, and it will be weeks, months, years before the actual real data goes all open-source on us.
a lot depends on how hot that fire is and how close it is to the structural members of that bridge. even more critical than spalling is the melting of reinforcing bars throughout the structure. I think the perfect example of that was the fire underneath the overpass in Atlanta 3 years ago. it literally melted the rebar out and render the entire structure useless. This was a very clever attack.
“Did anyone ever figure out why Stalin chose to ally himself with Hitler, enabling the invasion of Western Europe?”
Get a copy of Suvorov’s “Icebreaker”. The argument – and he has a LOT of fairly specific evidence to support it – technical specifications of the equipment issued, dispositions of the Soviet troops, movements of commanding officers – is that Stalin purposefully helped rearm Germany, then purposefully did the Pact to get his troops on Germany’s borders, with the plan that Hitler wouuld get himself tied up against France and England and then the Soviets could zoom across a “friendly” border and be on the Rhine before anybody could react. All in the name of World Communism, under Russia’s benevolent guidance. He also provides a fair amount of evidence that the kickoff date for the Soviet invasion was set to be a week or two after the day Barbarossa happened to start.
Whether Hitler attacked because he got wind of it and engaged in a desperate pre-emptive strike, or if it was just blind luck, is one of those things that probably will never be known for sure. The net result is that the war lasted long enough to end up with American troops holding the line in the middle of Germany, Russia wasn’t able to swallow Western Europe, and the communist march to world conquest stopped dead. All thanks to little Adolf going zig instead of zag.
For the bridge, I’ve seen claims it’s ATACMS and that the Saki strike was also, and that it’s being kept hush-hush that Ukraine has them for ~reasons~. I dunno about that. It’s possible, just like the Russian internal conflict explanation is possible. But the truck bomb thing seems high risk and incredibly lucky result also.
I’m impressed by the technique, here. Whoever did it. The average layman, which includes a lot of military types, have no idea at all how hard it is to drop a major bridge like this. It looks soooooo easy, in the movies… Then, you go to do it, detonate a ton of explosives in the wrong place, and the damn thing still sits there, usable, in utter defiance of your desires.
Demolition ain’t easy. Ask the guys at the Ludendorf Bridge, otherwise known as the Bridge at Remagen. Oh, you can’t… They were executed because the demo plan didn’t go according to plan, and the US Army got the bridge intact for long enough to jump the Rhein.
1) If this was a truck bomb, how was it being driven? Are there available suicide bombers to do this? From where?
2) Is it possible that this, and the nordstream explosion are actually Russian dissenters within the military that believe this is the only way to save their hides?
First, thanks to Rollory for the book recommendation. Free at the Kindle Store if you do Prime Plus.
Three questions (I’m not mil/ex-mil and don’t pretend to know these things):
First, could an ATACMS (or three) break the bridge enough? After all, the bridge didn’t collapse, it’s just that one critical section is all but unusable. From what I read on the web, the ATACMA is a nice-enough missile but doesn’t appear to have enough kaboom to wreck a large bridge.
Second, the US discontinued production of the ATACMS in 2007. Doubtless there are plenty in inventory (and so, a fire sale for Ukraine), but the US Army is relying on these until the replacement comes out. That’s “next year”, apparently, using scare quotes. Might we be thinning our own inventory too robustly?
Third, it was asked why Ukraine didn’t do this earlier (if they did it and I sure don’t know the answer to that). Perhaps the reason is that they were not in ATACMS range until their recent advances in Kherson? By my read of a map, if the Ukrainians moved a missile battery right to the front near Kherson, they might just maybe (perhaps) kinda sorta be in range. Not sure.
I’ve read the majority of Suvorov’s (AKA Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun) oeuvre and found his arguments… Reasonable. With the caveats that a.) there’s jack and sh*t for actual corroborative documentation, b.) he was very much “singing for his supper” to Westerners who wanted to believe certain things, and c.) there’s a bunch of stuff he’s essentially extrapolated out of thin air.
That said, in my opinion, he’s more right than he is wrong. You look at the documented historical facts we have access to, and it certainly look consonant with what Rezun has been saying, all these years. However, huge ‘effin comma, there’s “This sounds true to me…” and then there’s “I can prove this is true from this source here, that source there, that testimony, and these documents…” Rezun falls into that first category.
Whenever you read history, I’ve found that if you find yourself nodding along in agreement, and you’re pleased by it all…? You’re almost certainly being gulled by the historian, especially when he starts citing things you can’t access and he wants you to take him solely on authority.
Answer to your first question, from what’s been released so far, it was being driven by an actual human being. There’s imagery that purportedly shows him and the truck going through a very cursory inspection. He looks very blase for a guy about to blow himself up… And, while I’m sure that there are plenty of motivated Ukrainian victims of Russian atrocities who’d love the chance to screw the Russians like this, I would strongly suspect that Ukraine would have one hell of a time getting them, the truck, and the explosives together in operable condition inside Russia. If they did, this is the deep-penetration SF operation of the century, so far.
My money is on “Russians did this to themselves”. Why? No idea, but… Come on, now: The truck left from Russian territory, got through Russian security, and then blew up in exactly the right place to take out one side of the roadway, damage another, and then damn near take out the railway bridge at the same time. I don’t care who the hell you are, that’s one hell of a success for some one-off first-time attempt at something like this. I think this was a Russian faction, doing this to produce an excuse for either taking out another faction or winding this war down: “Oh, we’ve lost logistics, gotta go… Maybe next time!!”
I have no idea why they’d do this, if that’s the case. Or, which faction… I would love to know who is on the hook for security at that bridge, and what his career prospects currently are.
A single ATACMS could certainly do what we saw here, but I seriously doubt that that is what was used. The evidence does not look like an ATACMS strike, to my eye. Which is admittedly inexperienced with IRBM strikes…
I think this was a very professional and very well-resourced truck bomb. One that the driver may or may not have known about. Remote detonation is a likelihood, given that they detonated the charge at exactly the right place for what I presume to be the secondary incendiary load to set off the train’s tank cistern cars. Someone had to have had really good intelligence, suspiciously so. Then, there’s the not-so-minor question of “How’d they construct this bomb on Russian territory, conceal that, and then stick it into the traffic stream…?”
I’m here to tell you, having done this for a living, the guys behind this attack are either seriously good, seriously lucky, or they’re Russian. I don’t think it was a missile; I think it was a big-ass truck bomb with an equally big-ass secondary load of incendiaries, detonated at precisely the right point and time. It’s almost as if the guys running the railway were timing it to coincide with the blast, TBH.
As to the ATACMS inventory, I’ve got no idea. The military is horribly prone to under-estimating the needs for munitions like this, and Congress is notorious for cutting the budget on things we really, really need. While spending big bucks on other things that are well-supported because they’re spread out among so many constituencies… See NASA for other examples.
The US ranges on all these missiles are drastically understated, because Congress has a habit of crucifying contractors who over-sell the product. I suspect that ATACMS has a range well in excess of what’s in the literature, but I really don’t think that one was used here. If the Ukrainians had one, they would have more than that, and they would be using them on other targets. Or, they’d have repeated the strike on the bridge, in order to take it out.
My instincts are “Not ATACMS; truck bomb, probably by either the FSB or the GRU. Motivation unknown…”
Seriously… If this was the Ukrainians, and they did it with a truck bomb? This is the espionage/sabotage coup of the century. Not to take anything away from them, but… I think it’s a lot more likely that the Russians literally did this to themselves, in order to provide an excuse for the withdrawal from Crimea. Or, alternatively, this was the Russian’s “Cortez Moment”, where he burned his fleet so that his men had to win or die.
Logistically, that’s insanity. But, we’re talking Russians, here. The whole thing was insane on the 23rd of February, and still is.
I’ve been speculating about a truck bomb consisting of one truckload of Russian military munitions, all proper and expected, plus one satnav-triggered surprise.
But then my expertise in demolition is nonexistent, so take this idea with as many salt licks as appropriate.
These bridges are beam on bent designs. The roadbeds (the beams) are designed to allow movement and loosely pinned in place to localize the damage from allisions. This also localized the damage from the truck bomb.
The bents (cross beams at the top of the pier columns) appear to have survived without much damage. They are the most sensitive to this kind of incident. Their survival augers well for a quick repair of the structures.
The base of a flame is the coolest zone in a fire. The highest temperatures are above the flame. Hot air rises. Less than half of the chemical tank cars in the train burned, so the fire temperatures well above the tracks could not have been that hot.
The steel rails and concrete ties did not experience the temperatures your various analysts postulate. Keep in mind that railroad rails were exclusively annealed steel into the 1960s, and the vast majority of steel rails in service today are still annealed. The highest stress endured by a rail is at the bottom center surface of the rail. This area is protected from high temperatures by conduction and geometry. It will not have experienced a metallurgical transformation.
I don’t think those spans are at the original construction specification any more, and I’m pretty sure that my name would not be on any paperwork saying “Yeah, sure… Run normal traffic over those bridge spans… I’m sure it’ll all be OK…”
Not without extensive testing, that’s for damn sure. I’ve no idea what was in those cistern cars, or how long it was burning, and without that I’m not making any predictions. When you couple the extensive heat with the cold water shock-treatment they gave it, I strongly suspect that there are micro-fractures galore in those steel box beams, not to mention the welds holding them together. Add some additional stress, and there’s no telling what the failure mode is going to be. It ain’t like Russia is noted for the quality of its civil engineering work, anyway…
I know one thing, for sure: That bridge is now essentially uninsurable, and probably red-flagged for international traffic that requires insurance. Which ought to have interesting long-term business implications for whoever winds up running it…
This is now two mysterious events, both over a span of water.
The first was the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines. Second the bridge.
A sub could do it. One equipped with some fairly amazing technology. It would have to be whisper quiet, long range, and small. Equipped with explosives. For the pipelines it planted the explosives and left. For the bridge it might have fired something upwards, from just below the surface.
Only a few countries in the world could do this – one of them is the United States. But the other is Russia. Russia has a long history of micro and mini subs operating in both the Baltic and Black seas. Look up Swedish submarine incidents. That makes the most sense.
Why would Russia sabotage the Nordstream and the bridge? Well, elements of the Russian military are opposed to the war – they see it as a meat grinder destroying their military. In particular, the Russian navy lost one of their flagships. A practically irreplicable loss.
I don’t think this is a truck bomb – that is what the Russians say, but it is way too big an explosion. The timing was perfect – whoever did this had minute by minute information. the Russians were actually lucky here – the damage could have been MUCH worse.
The circumstances suggest that Russia is providing the excuses to allow a withdrawal.
One of the newest Nord Stream pipelines survived whatever happened.
Only one vehicle span of the Kerch Bridge was hit. I suspect that the train was coincidental. There is no reason to believe that the truck driver knew what he was carrying. A radio link or GPS could have triggered the payload. An explosion on the span over the shipping channel would have blocked vehicle and shipping traffic. This all looks like a Russian plan to cause dramatic but trivial damage so someone can use the incident as an excuse for Russian military failure. The Kerson military is “trapped” beyond several damaged bridges and is being hammered by a flank attack. 300,000 Mobiks (reservists) will be cannon fodder without food, fuel, ammo, or heavy equipment if they are sent into that pocket.
The pipeline incident allows for gas sales after the “crisis” is ended by a Russian withdrawal. The Swedes are being vague about the cause of the pipeline disruptions. Everyone is giving the Russians plausible deniability.
The ethnic Russian militias know that they are being sacrificed to allow Russian regulars to escape “caldrons”. They know what they are worth to the Russians.
The damaged bridge is thus a way to say, “It wasn’t our fault” before a general withdrawal. Then it is all about negotiations and a bluff. With the Chechens, Russia accepted an initial defeat, so as to come back later. That is probably part of the cover-story in the Ukraine.
I am convinced that Russia went into the Ukraine to gain control over the gas, oil, coal reserves that would endanger Russia’s fuel monopoly in Europe. They may think that they have done enough, or will do enough, damage to the Ukraine’s infrastructure to prevent development of those reserves. Thus they can now leave before the Russian government implodes.
It is important to understand the difference between heat and temperature.
The video shows an extremely fuel rich flame that is oxygen starved and has a very low adiabatic flame temperature. Hot flames do not show the yellows, reds, and black carbon particulates visible in the video. Hot hydrocarbon flames are literally ‘white hot’.
The flame shown in the video is struggling to generate enough heat to maintain ignition. The flammable liquid leaking from the chemical tank car is cascading along the surface of the reinforced concrete and might even be refrigerating it. It is not generating enough heat to raise the temperatures of the adjacent surfaces much.
Engineers really have to work to get high temperatures out of hydrocarbon fuel flames. Modern heat treating furnaces running fuel gasses at stoichiometric ratios are limited to about 1,700 F. This fire is nowhere near that hot. And you have to get eutectoid steel railroad rails to at least 1,333 F to effect any metallurgical transformations. That is not happening here.
Visual examination of the concrete structure surfaces for evidence of calcining is really all that is necessary to determine the integrity of the structure. Rails can be hardness tested in situ and MT or PT testing to look for cracks, but there will not be any. Rails are easy to replace, in any event. Railroads always have stacks of them prepositioned along their routes to repair lines after derailments.
The Russian railroads don’t have a lot of fancy analysis instrumentation, so they will resume operations with some degree of caution, but this is how railroads always proceeded prior to the electronics revolution. It is still a workable maintenance strategy.
Great discussion here, thanks. The Russian security camera we saw of the truck starting to climb, then the giant fireball… that looked like it went up all at once, not a whole bunch of secondary explosions from transporting ammo or missiles. And the Russian security camera of the truck inspection, it looked like it was packed tight with large boxes, quickly waved through. If a bomb was covertly planted in the truck, could it produce a single rapid large explosion like that? Could it have been a fertilizer truck with a planted charge?
The rail cars with fuel had apparently stopped on the bridge… easier to target, not sure if this was a regular occurrence.
I definitely agree with others that a damaged bridge is not a safe bridge. Shoving traffic over before proper examination it is an admission of having no options. I’ve seen video of the melted rails near the original fire… hard to believe the rails a few feet over and their supports are unaffected.
The Russians are putting out security footage and what they claim is the X-ray of the truck that contained the VBIED. The two obviously do not match, the X-ray version missing an entire axle and obvious things like framework beneath the trailer.
They’re lying about it, and the big question is this: Why?
There’s no reason to conceal or lie about what the VBIED was contained in, and they’re being so damn obvious about it it’s like “WTF?”. A layperson could look at the released X-ray and say “Yeah, those two things don’t look the same…”
Which leads me back to my “tortured reasoning” that this wasn’t a Ukrainian attack. The question of just how the hell the Ukrainians would have gotten the wherewithal to put a huge truck bomb together, and then take it onto the bridge past security? Remains unanswered; you’d think the Russians would have rolled up the safe houses and sites where the bomb was put together, by now.
Which is why I think the phone calls are coming from inside the house. Remember, Putin came to power because of a “false flag” apartment that was supposedly blown up by Chechen “terrorists”. This is right out of his playbook, but I’ll be damned if I see where the endgame lays, right now. Justification for withdrawal…? Justification for escalation to nukes? Just plain stupidity?
Sometimes, the intel/law enforcement types outsmart themselves with this crap. There’s been speculation that the OKC Federal Building was an unexpected target because the group McVeigh was working with rumbled to a BATF informant in their midst, and then redirected the attack to their offices. Which ties into an EOD tech who was working out of Tinker telling me that they’d been on standby that morning along with the fire department for something out in northeastern Oklahoma City, and were totally surprised by the Federal Building going up…
Which might have a bit of resonance with this, if the FSB had meant for a false-flag attack to be stopped, making them heroes. Only, it got through…
Speculation is about all we can do, at this point. There are things that militate against all theories I’ve heard so far–If it was a suicide VBIED, then why was the driver in the outside lane? If he’d stayed to the inside, more damage would have been done to the other span and the railway bridge. If it was a water-borne attack, why the scorching visible on the road surface? If a missile, WTF do the Ukrainians have that fits the parameters, because doing the math? That blast was a hell of a lot bigger than you’d get with an ATACMS. Plus, no obvious signature, and you’d think the Russians would be trumpeting that crap to the world if they thought it was an ATACMS.
The inept response to all this just makes me wonder. If they were trying for a false-flag attack, you would think they’d have the “evidence” ready to go. If it was Ukrainians, why haven’t they rolled up the network that did this? Tracing that truck back should be a fairly simple exercise, if that was indeed the VBIED. Where was it put together? Where were these Ukrainian arch-spies hiding, and why haven’t they been caught?
It’s almost like this is a comedy of errors, rather than an actual attack by the Ukrainians. The more I see, the more I’m thinking there’s something really, really hinky with all of it, all the way around. Time will tell us more, though…
A comment on the rail side of the bridge. Rails are made of HARDENED steel or iron. Heated up red hot then quenched. At least the top layer is. A couple of different descriptions on how their made.The rails, at least a good portion, were heated up red hot and slowly cooled- making them annealed iron steel, more ductile, easier to bend and shape.
The wheels are a hardened steel alloy. Running them across annealed rails will work- for a while, before you get a major derailment.
The X-ray released by the Russians wasn’t of the truck at the bridge; it’s of the truck when it entered Armenia, supposedly. Which was why the tractor is missing an axle, and the profile of the truck trailer isn’t the same as the X-ray.
Which sort of begs the question of why they released it, in the first place. Supposedly, this explosive payload was concealed in a bunch of acrylic edge-banding (like for furniture plywood), and then transported through multiple Black Sea states from the Ukraine, then cross-loaded at a warehouse in Russia.
This does not pass the bullshit detector, I’m afraid. For one, the point that the driver didn’t know what he was carrying makes sense; if he was a legit “suicide” driver who knew his mission, then he’d have been in the inside lane, not on the outside one. Another point would be that the trailer and its load had to have been prepared within Russia, and about all that was used from the load originating in Bulgaria was likely the shipping manifest and supporting paperwork. The warehouse where that load was stored and transshipped had to be where the explosives were put into the trailer and the whole thing prepped for the attack; the fusing would have been… Interesting. GPS would have had to have an external antenna, and if there was an external radio-controlled trigger in another vehicle, where’d that vehicle go? Wouldn’t the Russians have stopped, detained, and searched everyone on the bridge at the time…?
If the Ukrainians pulled this off, it’s one of the intel/sabotage coups of this century or any other. I still think they’re taking credit for an internal Russian operation, because I’m just not seeing someone managing to pull off all the necessary shenanigans without being caught by the FSB way before it got as far as an actual attack.
Although, I wouldn’t rule out some idiot FSB agent or team wanting to make a name for themselves by stopping this as it happened, and then actually failing to do it. I still think that the Russian security forces had to be involved, somehow… Or, maybe I’m just projecting more competency than they actually possess; a lot of this invasion has looked as though it were performed by cut-rate Nazis cosplaying as Keystone Kops.
If you haven’t seen the video of the MT-LB driving over the row of landmines laid out in clear view on the road it turned on to… Look for it. I used to think that was about one of the stupidest things ever, when I saw people doing it and read where they recommended it as an actual legit technique in the manuals. After seeing that video, I’m a lot less certain about my assessments of the intelligence of the average Russian soldier. They really are that dumb… What’s worse? I’ve seen some who say that the mines they attempted to drive over were Russian-laid, and that the guys in the MT-LB were the ones to lay them. I can’t quite bring myself to believe that, but…
I honestly don’t know what to make of this.
There are things that militate against this being Ukrainian, no matter what attack technique was utilized. First off, if it was a truck? It came from Russia, got through the inspection, and then detonated nearly perfectly. If it was a sea-based attack, it was from the Sea of Azov direction, and that is basically a Russian lake at the moment. A missile? If the Ukrainians have missiles capable of hitting the bridge, why didn’t they do it before and why was there only the single strike?
Given everything going on around this, I’d be willing to entertain all sorts of “unlikely” scenarios, up to and including that the attack was performed by Russia or factions within it. It could very well be that what we’re seeing played out here in front of the world is factional infighting between parts of the Russian kakistocracy, for entirely opaque reasons. Same with Nordstream. It isn’t outside the realm of possibility that one or both of these attacks are meant to discredit Putin or factions within the Russian government, as a means to justify going to the negotiating table or to escalate to nukes…
With the Russians, you never know. You think you understand what they see as the rational self-interested course of action, and then they do something entirely different and apparently against their own interest. The logic escapes outsiders, and probably confuses the sh*t out of the people inside the system, as well. Did anyone ever figure out why Stalin chose to ally himself with Hitler, enabling the invasion of Western Europe? Was that a “good idea”?
I will say that for an improvised bomb, they did an incredible amount of damage. Way more than you can generally expect from even a planned demolition of a target like this, which would normally take days or weeks and tons of explosives unless the bridge was designed with prechambered detonation in mind. The fact that the Russians are actually running trains over that heat-stressed railway bridge that they dumped tons of cold seawater on…? That’s eye-wateringly ill-judged, and I’d never in a million years ever even suggest such a course of action. Those bridge spans are now a major rail accident waiting to happen…
Sane people would be shutting that bridge down for weeks of careful inspection and testing. Apparently, the Russians aren’t sane…
No surprises.
Additionally, repair efforts will offer nice target opportunities for the UA artillery and Special Operations folks. Bet the rail bridge drops after any really significant usage. Even with some of the roadway open, it’s still a squeeze on resupply efforts.
Big Red will conduct terror bombardments of Ukrainian civilians and non-military facilities. Terror bombing of civilian targets wasn’t as helpful to the Allied war effort as had been hoped. The Germans held out until Allied infantry and tanks occupied every square mile of the Reich. Took two atom bombs to get Japan’s attention.
Russian collapse won’t happen quickly until it does.
3.5 ton weight capacity? That’s not even an F250 carrying a full cargo load, and certainly not a trailer. That’s not even a rural mail route, because Farmer John can drive his F250 loaded with hay bales in the bed and towing a trailer holding 4 cows down a rural mail route.
(F250 curb weight is about 2.5 tons, with a cargo capability of around 2 tons, depending on year and exact variant)
As a person who studied and did bridge demolition for 25 years, I’m going to have to go on record as saying that whoever did this either knew precisely what they were doing, or they got incredibly lucky. Big bridges are absolutely not easy targets–They’re why we developed the Small Atomic Demolition Munition and its sibling, the MADM. You want to even disable a bridge the size of the one at Kerch, you’re talking about needing time, explosives, and access that really militate against doing it casually. Typically, a bridge on this scale requires weeks of prep and tons of explosives. The planned demolition of the Remagen bridge was months in planning and preparation–And, when the time came? It failed.
So, whoever did this? I’m impressed. I’m also completely unable to say for certain how it was done. Without seeing the submerged parts of the bridge deck, I can’t tell for sure what happened. I see what looks like scorch marks on the top of the deck, but…?
Hell, who the hell really knows? Maybe this was a freakin’ accident, and that truck was hauling Soviet-era munitions around, and just happened to pop at just the right moment…
Alternatively, maybe a meteorite?
I honestly just don’t see the Ukrainians being able to pull off putting together a truck bomb in Russian territory, or managing to get a remote-controlled vessel at it through the Azov Sea. Missiles? Maybe. I wish I could remember how much signature an ATACMS made before impact; I vaguely remember that there was very little to see, but I’m also remembering something about an ionized trail under some atmospheric conditions. The surveillance footage I’ve seen of the site before the blast is pretty inconclusive.
Ah, well… It’s like Nordstream, and it will be weeks, months, years before the actual real data goes all open-source on us.
a lot depends on how hot that fire is and how close it is to the structural members of that bridge. even more critical than spalling is the melting of reinforcing bars throughout the structure. I think the perfect example of that was the fire underneath the overpass in Atlanta 3 years ago. it literally melted the rebar out and render the entire structure useless. This was a very clever attack.
Kirk –
“Did anyone ever figure out why Stalin chose to ally himself with Hitler, enabling the invasion of Western Europe?”
Get a copy of Suvorov’s “Icebreaker”. The argument – and he has a LOT of fairly specific evidence to support it – technical specifications of the equipment issued, dispositions of the Soviet troops, movements of commanding officers – is that Stalin purposefully helped rearm Germany, then purposefully did the Pact to get his troops on Germany’s borders, with the plan that Hitler wouuld get himself tied up against France and England and then the Soviets could zoom across a “friendly” border and be on the Rhine before anybody could react. All in the name of World Communism, under Russia’s benevolent guidance. He also provides a fair amount of evidence that the kickoff date for the Soviet invasion was set to be a week or two after the day Barbarossa happened to start.
Whether Hitler attacked because he got wind of it and engaged in a desperate pre-emptive strike, or if it was just blind luck, is one of those things that probably will never be known for sure. The net result is that the war lasted long enough to end up with American troops holding the line in the middle of Germany, Russia wasn’t able to swallow Western Europe, and the communist march to world conquest stopped dead. All thanks to little Adolf going zig instead of zag.
For the bridge, I’ve seen claims it’s ATACMS and that the Saki strike was also, and that it’s being kept hush-hush that Ukraine has them for ~reasons~. I dunno about that. It’s possible, just like the Russian internal conflict explanation is possible. But the truck bomb thing seems high risk and incredibly lucky result also.
Interesting points made by a former EOD officer for Finland:
https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1579480666282287104
I’m impressed by the technique, here. Whoever did it. The average layman, which includes a lot of military types, have no idea at all how hard it is to drop a major bridge like this. It looks soooooo easy, in the movies… Then, you go to do it, detonate a ton of explosives in the wrong place, and the damn thing still sits there, usable, in utter defiance of your desires.
Demolition ain’t easy. Ask the guys at the Ludendorf Bridge, otherwise known as the Bridge at Remagen. Oh, you can’t… They were executed because the demo plan didn’t go according to plan, and the US Army got the bridge intact for long enough to jump the Rhein.
A couple of thoughts/questions:
1) If this was a truck bomb, how was it being driven? Are there available suicide bombers to do this? From where?
2) Is it possible that this, and the nordstream explosion are actually Russian dissenters within the military that believe this is the only way to save their hides?
First, thanks to Rollory for the book recommendation. Free at the Kindle Store if you do Prime Plus.
Three questions (I’m not mil/ex-mil and don’t pretend to know these things):
First, could an ATACMS (or three) break the bridge enough? After all, the bridge didn’t collapse, it’s just that one critical section is all but unusable. From what I read on the web, the ATACMA is a nice-enough missile but doesn’t appear to have enough kaboom to wreck a large bridge.
Second, the US discontinued production of the ATACMS in 2007. Doubtless there are plenty in inventory (and so, a fire sale for Ukraine), but the US Army is relying on these until the replacement comes out. That’s “next year”, apparently, using scare quotes. Might we be thinning our own inventory too robustly?
Third, it was asked why Ukraine didn’t do this earlier (if they did it and I sure don’t know the answer to that). Perhaps the reason is that they were not in ATACMS range until their recent advances in Kherson? By my read of a map, if the Ukrainians moved a missile battery right to the front near Kherson, they might just maybe (perhaps) kinda sorta be in range. Not sure.
@Rollory,
I’ve read the majority of Suvorov’s (AKA Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun) oeuvre and found his arguments… Reasonable. With the caveats that a.) there’s jack and sh*t for actual corroborative documentation, b.) he was very much “singing for his supper” to Westerners who wanted to believe certain things, and c.) there’s a bunch of stuff he’s essentially extrapolated out of thin air.
That said, in my opinion, he’s more right than he is wrong. You look at the documented historical facts we have access to, and it certainly look consonant with what Rezun has been saying, all these years. However, huge ‘effin comma, there’s “This sounds true to me…” and then there’s “I can prove this is true from this source here, that source there, that testimony, and these documents…” Rezun falls into that first category.
Whenever you read history, I’ve found that if you find yourself nodding along in agreement, and you’re pleased by it all…? You’re almost certainly being gulled by the historian, especially when he starts citing things you can’t access and he wants you to take him solely on authority.
@George,
Answer to your first question, from what’s been released so far, it was being driven by an actual human being. There’s imagery that purportedly shows him and the truck going through a very cursory inspection. He looks very blase for a guy about to blow himself up… And, while I’m sure that there are plenty of motivated Ukrainian victims of Russian atrocities who’d love the chance to screw the Russians like this, I would strongly suspect that Ukraine would have one hell of a time getting them, the truck, and the explosives together in operable condition inside Russia. If they did, this is the deep-penetration SF operation of the century, so far.
My money is on “Russians did this to themselves”. Why? No idea, but… Come on, now: The truck left from Russian territory, got through Russian security, and then blew up in exactly the right place to take out one side of the roadway, damage another, and then damn near take out the railway bridge at the same time. I don’t care who the hell you are, that’s one hell of a success for some one-off first-time attempt at something like this. I think this was a Russian faction, doing this to produce an excuse for either taking out another faction or winding this war down: “Oh, we’ve lost logistics, gotta go… Maybe next time!!”
I have no idea why they’d do this, if that’s the case. Or, which faction… I would love to know who is on the hook for security at that bridge, and what his career prospects currently are.
@ Steve White,
A single ATACMS could certainly do what we saw here, but I seriously doubt that that is what was used. The evidence does not look like an ATACMS strike, to my eye. Which is admittedly inexperienced with IRBM strikes…
I think this was a very professional and very well-resourced truck bomb. One that the driver may or may not have known about. Remote detonation is a likelihood, given that they detonated the charge at exactly the right place for what I presume to be the secondary incendiary load to set off the train’s tank cistern cars. Someone had to have had really good intelligence, suspiciously so. Then, there’s the not-so-minor question of “How’d they construct this bomb on Russian territory, conceal that, and then stick it into the traffic stream…?”
I’m here to tell you, having done this for a living, the guys behind this attack are either seriously good, seriously lucky, or they’re Russian. I don’t think it was a missile; I think it was a big-ass truck bomb with an equally big-ass secondary load of incendiaries, detonated at precisely the right point and time. It’s almost as if the guys running the railway were timing it to coincide with the blast, TBH.
As to the ATACMS inventory, I’ve got no idea. The military is horribly prone to under-estimating the needs for munitions like this, and Congress is notorious for cutting the budget on things we really, really need. While spending big bucks on other things that are well-supported because they’re spread out among so many constituencies… See NASA for other examples.
The US ranges on all these missiles are drastically understated, because Congress has a habit of crucifying contractors who over-sell the product. I suspect that ATACMS has a range well in excess of what’s in the literature, but I really don’t think that one was used here. If the Ukrainians had one, they would have more than that, and they would be using them on other targets. Or, they’d have repeated the strike on the bridge, in order to take it out.
My instincts are “Not ATACMS; truck bomb, probably by either the FSB or the GRU. Motivation unknown…”
Seriously… If this was the Ukrainians, and they did it with a truck bomb? This is the espionage/sabotage coup of the century. Not to take anything away from them, but… I think it’s a lot more likely that the Russians literally did this to themselves, in order to provide an excuse for the withdrawal from Crimea. Or, alternatively, this was the Russian’s “Cortez Moment”, where he burned his fleet so that his men had to win or die.
Logistically, that’s insanity. But, we’re talking Russians, here. The whole thing was insane on the 23rd of February, and still is.
I’ve been speculating about a truck bomb consisting of one truckload of Russian military munitions, all proper and expected, plus one satnav-triggered surprise.
But then my expertise in demolition is nonexistent, so take this idea with as many salt licks as appropriate.
These bridges are beam on bent designs. The roadbeds (the beams) are designed to allow movement and loosely pinned in place to localize the damage from allisions. This also localized the damage from the truck bomb.
The bents (cross beams at the top of the pier columns) appear to have survived without much damage. They are the most sensitive to this kind of incident. Their survival augers well for a quick repair of the structures.
The base of a flame is the coolest zone in a fire. The highest temperatures are above the flame. Hot air rises. Less than half of the chemical tank cars in the train burned, so the fire temperatures well above the tracks could not have been that hot.
The steel rails and concrete ties did not experience the temperatures your various analysts postulate. Keep in mind that railroad rails were exclusively annealed steel into the 1960s, and the vast majority of steel rails in service today are still annealed. The highest stress endured by a rail is at the bottom center surface of the rail. This area is protected from high temperatures by conduction and geometry. It will not have experienced a metallurgical transformation.
@10X25,
Apparently, you did not see the leaking fuels burning on the side of the bridge beams:
https://youtu.be/6mORLGcQH1g
I don’t think those spans are at the original construction specification any more, and I’m pretty sure that my name would not be on any paperwork saying “Yeah, sure… Run normal traffic over those bridge spans… I’m sure it’ll all be OK…”
Not without extensive testing, that’s for damn sure. I’ve no idea what was in those cistern cars, or how long it was burning, and without that I’m not making any predictions. When you couple the extensive heat with the cold water shock-treatment they gave it, I strongly suspect that there are micro-fractures galore in those steel box beams, not to mention the welds holding them together. Add some additional stress, and there’s no telling what the failure mode is going to be. It ain’t like Russia is noted for the quality of its civil engineering work, anyway…
I know one thing, for sure: That bridge is now essentially uninsurable, and probably red-flagged for international traffic that requires insurance. Which ought to have interesting long-term business implications for whoever winds up running it…
This is now two mysterious events, both over a span of water.
The first was the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines. Second the bridge.
A sub could do it. One equipped with some fairly amazing technology. It would have to be whisper quiet, long range, and small. Equipped with explosives. For the pipelines it planted the explosives and left. For the bridge it might have fired something upwards, from just below the surface.
Only a few countries in the world could do this – one of them is the United States. But the other is Russia. Russia has a long history of micro and mini subs operating in both the Baltic and Black seas. Look up Swedish submarine incidents. That makes the most sense.
Why would Russia sabotage the Nordstream and the bridge? Well, elements of the Russian military are opposed to the war – they see it as a meat grinder destroying their military. In particular, the Russian navy lost one of their flagships. A practically irreplicable loss.
I don’t think this is a truck bomb – that is what the Russians say, but it is way too big an explosion. The timing was perfect – whoever did this had minute by minute information. the Russians were actually lucky here – the damage could have been MUCH worse.
Russian navy, best guess.
The circumstances suggest that Russia is providing the excuses to allow a withdrawal.
One of the newest Nord Stream pipelines survived whatever happened.
Only one vehicle span of the Kerch Bridge was hit. I suspect that the train was coincidental. There is no reason to believe that the truck driver knew what he was carrying. A radio link or GPS could have triggered the payload. An explosion on the span over the shipping channel would have blocked vehicle and shipping traffic. This all looks like a Russian plan to cause dramatic but trivial damage so someone can use the incident as an excuse for Russian military failure. The Kerson military is “trapped” beyond several damaged bridges and is being hammered by a flank attack. 300,000 Mobiks (reservists) will be cannon fodder without food, fuel, ammo, or heavy equipment if they are sent into that pocket.
The pipeline incident allows for gas sales after the “crisis” is ended by a Russian withdrawal. The Swedes are being vague about the cause of the pipeline disruptions. Everyone is giving the Russians plausible deniability.
The ethnic Russian militias know that they are being sacrificed to allow Russian regulars to escape “caldrons”. They know what they are worth to the Russians.
The damaged bridge is thus a way to say, “It wasn’t our fault” before a general withdrawal. Then it is all about negotiations and a bluff. With the Chechens, Russia accepted an initial defeat, so as to come back later. That is probably part of the cover-story in the Ukraine.
I am convinced that Russia went into the Ukraine to gain control over the gas, oil, coal reserves that would endanger Russia’s fuel monopoly in Europe. They may think that they have done enough, or will do enough, damage to the Ukraine’s infrastructure to prevent development of those reserves. Thus they can now leave before the Russian government implodes.
Kirk –
It is important to understand the difference between heat and temperature.
The video shows an extremely fuel rich flame that is oxygen starved and has a very low adiabatic flame temperature. Hot flames do not show the yellows, reds, and black carbon particulates visible in the video. Hot hydrocarbon flames are literally ‘white hot’.
The flame shown in the video is struggling to generate enough heat to maintain ignition. The flammable liquid leaking from the chemical tank car is cascading along the surface of the reinforced concrete and might even be refrigerating it. It is not generating enough heat to raise the temperatures of the adjacent surfaces much.
Engineers really have to work to get high temperatures out of hydrocarbon fuel flames. Modern heat treating furnaces running fuel gasses at stoichiometric ratios are limited to about 1,700 F. This fire is nowhere near that hot. And you have to get eutectoid steel railroad rails to at least 1,333 F to effect any metallurgical transformations. That is not happening here.
Visual examination of the concrete structure surfaces for evidence of calcining is really all that is necessary to determine the integrity of the structure. Rails can be hardness tested in situ and MT or PT testing to look for cracks, but there will not be any. Rails are easy to replace, in any event. Railroads always have stacks of them prepositioned along their routes to repair lines after derailments.
The Russian railroads don’t have a lot of fancy analysis instrumentation, so they will resume operations with some degree of caution, but this is how railroads always proceeded prior to the electronics revolution. It is still a workable maintenance strategy.
[…] Kerch Strait Bridge Update […]
Great discussion here, thanks. The Russian security camera we saw of the truck starting to climb, then the giant fireball… that looked like it went up all at once, not a whole bunch of secondary explosions from transporting ammo or missiles. And the Russian security camera of the truck inspection, it looked like it was packed tight with large boxes, quickly waved through. If a bomb was covertly planted in the truck, could it produce a single rapid large explosion like that? Could it have been a fertilizer truck with a planted charge?
The rail cars with fuel had apparently stopped on the bridge… easier to target, not sure if this was a regular occurrence.
I definitely agree with others that a damaged bridge is not a safe bridge. Shoving traffic over before proper examination it is an admission of having no options. I’ve seen video of the melted rails near the original fire… hard to believe the rails a few feet over and their supports are unaffected.
Data point in all this?
The Russians are putting out security footage and what they claim is the X-ray of the truck that contained the VBIED. The two obviously do not match, the X-ray version missing an entire axle and obvious things like framework beneath the trailer.
They’re lying about it, and the big question is this: Why?
There’s no reason to conceal or lie about what the VBIED was contained in, and they’re being so damn obvious about it it’s like “WTF?”. A layperson could look at the released X-ray and say “Yeah, those two things don’t look the same…”
Which leads me back to my “tortured reasoning” that this wasn’t a Ukrainian attack. The question of just how the hell the Ukrainians would have gotten the wherewithal to put a huge truck bomb together, and then take it onto the bridge past security? Remains unanswered; you’d think the Russians would have rolled up the safe houses and sites where the bomb was put together, by now.
Which is why I think the phone calls are coming from inside the house. Remember, Putin came to power because of a “false flag” apartment that was supposedly blown up by Chechen “terrorists”. This is right out of his playbook, but I’ll be damned if I see where the endgame lays, right now. Justification for withdrawal…? Justification for escalation to nukes? Just plain stupidity?
Sometimes, the intel/law enforcement types outsmart themselves with this crap. There’s been speculation that the OKC Federal Building was an unexpected target because the group McVeigh was working with rumbled to a BATF informant in their midst, and then redirected the attack to their offices. Which ties into an EOD tech who was working out of Tinker telling me that they’d been on standby that morning along with the fire department for something out in northeastern Oklahoma City, and were totally surprised by the Federal Building going up…
Which might have a bit of resonance with this, if the FSB had meant for a false-flag attack to be stopped, making them heroes. Only, it got through…
Speculation is about all we can do, at this point. There are things that militate against all theories I’ve heard so far–If it was a suicide VBIED, then why was the driver in the outside lane? If he’d stayed to the inside, more damage would have been done to the other span and the railway bridge. If it was a water-borne attack, why the scorching visible on the road surface? If a missile, WTF do the Ukrainians have that fits the parameters, because doing the math? That blast was a hell of a lot bigger than you’d get with an ATACMS. Plus, no obvious signature, and you’d think the Russians would be trumpeting that crap to the world if they thought it was an ATACMS.
The inept response to all this just makes me wonder. If they were trying for a false-flag attack, you would think they’d have the “evidence” ready to go. If it was Ukrainians, why haven’t they rolled up the network that did this? Tracing that truck back should be a fairly simple exercise, if that was indeed the VBIED. Where was it put together? Where were these Ukrainian arch-spies hiding, and why haven’t they been caught?
It’s almost like this is a comedy of errors, rather than an actual attack by the Ukrainians. The more I see, the more I’m thinking there’s something really, really hinky with all of it, all the way around. Time will tell us more, though…
A comment on the rail side of the bridge. Rails are made of HARDENED steel or iron. Heated up red hot then quenched. At least the top layer is. A couple of different descriptions on how their made.The rails, at least a good portion, were heated up red hot and slowly cooled- making them annealed iron steel, more ductile, easier to bend and shape.
The wheels are a hardened steel alloy. Running them across annealed rails will work- for a while, before you get a major derailment.
Well, one of the hinks has been clarified…
The X-ray released by the Russians wasn’t of the truck at the bridge; it’s of the truck when it entered Armenia, supposedly. Which was why the tractor is missing an axle, and the profile of the truck trailer isn’t the same as the X-ray.
Which sort of begs the question of why they released it, in the first place. Supposedly, this explosive payload was concealed in a bunch of acrylic edge-banding (like for furniture plywood), and then transported through multiple Black Sea states from the Ukraine, then cross-loaded at a warehouse in Russia.
This does not pass the bullshit detector, I’m afraid. For one, the point that the driver didn’t know what he was carrying makes sense; if he was a legit “suicide” driver who knew his mission, then he’d have been in the inside lane, not on the outside one. Another point would be that the trailer and its load had to have been prepared within Russia, and about all that was used from the load originating in Bulgaria was likely the shipping manifest and supporting paperwork. The warehouse where that load was stored and transshipped had to be where the explosives were put into the trailer and the whole thing prepped for the attack; the fusing would have been… Interesting. GPS would have had to have an external antenna, and if there was an external radio-controlled trigger in another vehicle, where’d that vehicle go? Wouldn’t the Russians have stopped, detained, and searched everyone on the bridge at the time…?
If the Ukrainians pulled this off, it’s one of the intel/sabotage coups of this century or any other. I still think they’re taking credit for an internal Russian operation, because I’m just not seeing someone managing to pull off all the necessary shenanigans without being caught by the FSB way before it got as far as an actual attack.
Although, I wouldn’t rule out some idiot FSB agent or team wanting to make a name for themselves by stopping this as it happened, and then actually failing to do it. I still think that the Russian security forces had to be involved, somehow… Or, maybe I’m just projecting more competency than they actually possess; a lot of this invasion has looked as though it were performed by cut-rate Nazis cosplaying as Keystone Kops.
If you haven’t seen the video of the MT-LB driving over the row of landmines laid out in clear view on the road it turned on to… Look for it. I used to think that was about one of the stupidest things ever, when I saw people doing it and read where they recommended it as an actual legit technique in the manuals. After seeing that video, I’m a lot less certain about my assessments of the intelligence of the average Russian soldier. They really are that dumb… What’s worse? I’ve seen some who say that the mines they attempted to drive over were Russian-laid, and that the guys in the MT-LB were the ones to lay them. I can’t quite bring myself to believe that, but…