I Feel A Disturbance In The Force

From Reuters,

A powerful explosion seriously damaged Russia’s road-and-rail bridge to Crimea on Saturday, hitting a prestige symbol of Moscow’s annexation of the peninsula and the key supply route to Russian forces battling to hold territory captured in southern Ukraine.

. . . It now represents a major artery for the Russian forces who have taken control of most of southern Ukraine's Kherson region, and for the naval port of Sevastopol, whose governor told locals: "Keep calm. Don't panic."

It was not yet clear if the blast was a deliberate attack, but the damage to such high-profile infrastructure came at a time when Russia has suffered several battlefield defeats and could further cloud the Kremlin's messages of reassurance to its public that the conflict is going to plan.

This is a key event in the war, symbolically as important as the sinking of the Moskva, but strategically much more important, as among other things, it appears to have caused panic among the Russian occupiers in Crimea. But it's also a significant blow to Russian supply along the whole southern front:

The strike on the Crimean bridge will significantly affect further events on the front. This was announced by military expert Alexander Musienko during the information telethon.

He drew attention to the fact that most of the weapons and reinforcements of the personnel of the Russian army were carried out from the Crimea. Troops across the peninsula were transferred to the Zaporozhye direction and to the Kherson region. The destruction of the bridge will make this impossible.

To be clear, photographic evidence shows that only two of the four highway lanes have been destroyed, while what appears to be a prestressed concrete rail bridge section is visually intact, although it's likely that the heat of the hydrocarbon fuel fire on the train will cause less visible but critical damage to the rail bridge as well:

These fires release enormous heats within seconds and then come into being extremely high temperatures that can almost melt a lot of materials, as shown in Fig. 2 (Baidu, 2022b). Consequently, bridge fires are typically high and intense followed with explosive burning. Peak temperature stemmed from these bridge fires can exceed 1000 °C as discussed above.

These high and intense fires can lead to severe deterioration of the structural rigidity and load-bearing capacity in key structural members of bridges. This deterioration of rigidity and strength in main structural members can cause commonly complete failure and even collapse of fire-damaged bridges.

According to The Guardian, the Russian transport ministry has announced that rail traffic will resume at 8 PM. But as a commenter said, "And will halt again at 8.01pm when the first train collapses the span and falls into the Black Sea."

As of now, it simply isn't clear how this was done. As far as anyone can tell, this was two simultaneous detonations, one on the train carrying flammable fuel, and a separate one that collapsed two spans of the highway bridge in one direction. This leaves two highway lanes open out of four, plus the theoretical ability simply to pull the wrecked train off the bridge (very carefully) and repair the track -- but Western engineers almost certainly would not regard this as a realistic solution due to the clear fire damage to the concrete rail spans.

In fact, I would imagine that the damage to the rail spans due to the hydrocarbon fire was planned by Ukraine as part of the operation.

And although the bridge has been damaged and not completely destroyed, it's plain that if Ukraine was able to do this once, they can do it again, especially as it's just not clear how they did it. But Putin has ordered an investigation.

I think this thing is going to end a lot sooner than people expect.