The tactical questions of how the Ukrainians pulled off this strike and of whether lasting damage has occurred are interesting and important but currently unresolvable publicly. What can, however, be more profitably discussed is what this tells us about where the Russia-Ukraine war is headed.
“Battles are the principal milestones of secular history,” Winston Churchill wrote in his biography of the Duke of Marlborough. The strike on the Kerch Strait Bridge was not a battle, but it was an important contributor to one of the great inflection points of this war—the moment when Russian elites began to understand that they are losing. The retreat of Russian forces from Kyiv in the early spring could be awkwardly explained as an unreciprocated gesture of goodwill. It did not involve a rout. The Ukrainian counteroffensive that liberated the Kharkiv region was a more difficult-to-swallow “repositioning” accompanied, however, by video images of the surrender and slaughter of retreating troops. Both could be understood as the result of poor decisions by military leaders who could be sacked and replaced.
The Kerch Strait Bridge attack, by contrast, inflicted at most a couple of casualties but packed multiple punches. It struck a prime symbol of the project of Russian imperial restoration, an expensive structure designed to link a Crimea reincorporated into Russia with the motherland. It damaged a crucial supply route. It showed that Ukraine could reach deep behind Russian lines to hit, with exquisite precision, a key and extremely well-defended target. It was, above all, a personal as well as a national humiliation: This was Vladimir Putin’s pet construction project, and it was the most unwelcome gift possible on his 70th birthday.
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