Ukraine Update…217 days into the Russian move on the Ukraine…Crimea Bridge Bomb…..

• A truck exploded on the bridge’s roadway, setting fuel tanks on fire as a train crossed, according to a Russian law enforcement body, which also said at least three people were killed. The cause of the blast was not immediately clear. Photos showed a thick plume of smoke rising from the nearly $4 billion crossing, also known as Kerch Bridge, which Putin personally inaugurated in 2018 by driving across in a truck.
• Traffic in the undamaged part of the bridge has resumed with cars and buses traveling in one lane, the Russian Transportation Ministry said on Telegram. Train service on the bridge resumed Saturday evening, the Russian carrier Grand Service Express said on Telegram. Two car ferries with a total capacity of up to 50 road trains were expected to begin operating no later that Sunday morning, the Russian Transportation Ministry announced on Telegram. The transportation agency said more ferries are scheduled to run in the following days.
• Officials in Kyiv celebrated the blast while stopping short of claiming responsibility for it. The news site Ukrainska Pravda reported first that the explosion was the work of Ukraine’s SBU security service, citing an unidentified law enforcement official. An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described it as “the beginning,” while the Ukrainian parliament wrote: “Crimea, long time no see.” The head of Ukraine’s postal service, Igor Smelyansky, announcedthe release of a stamp titled “Crimean Bridge-Done” featuring the damaged bridge.
• Putin ordered a government commission to investigate the “accident on the Crimean Bridge” and was receiving updates from authorities, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. He said there were “no forecasts on the timing of the reconstruction” of the bridge, which serves rail and vehicles. A Crimea official said the bridge’s navigable arches were not damaged. Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin asked people to reduce use of the bridge.
• Some Russian lawmakers struck an angrier, more urgent tone. Duma Deputy Leonid Slutsky said there was “no doubt” Kyiv was behind the blast and Duma Deputy Oleg Morozov called it “a declaration of war without rules.” Meanwhile, Alexander Kots, a military correspondent for a pro-government paper, wrote: “The stupidest thing to do now is to start reassuring the country. … Let’s already fight more angrily, for real.”
• Authorities in Crimea said they had enough food and fuel on the peninsula, which the Kremlin annexed in 2014after a disputed referendum. They urged people not to panic-buy and sought to reassure residents that there is now a land corridor to Russia, via swaths of Ukraine’s southeast and east that Russian forces had seized and claimed to annex. Sergei Aksyonov, Crimea’s Russian-backed leader, asked on Telegramthat hotels allow tourists to extend their accommodations, which the government would fund.

• Surovikin was designated as the Kremlin’s top commander of troops in Ukraine, the Russian Defense Ministry announced Saturday. This is the first time Russia has officially announced a leader of the overall effort to take over Ukraine, an invasion that began in February. He is the latest to take command in what has been a months-long shuffle of Russian military leaders in Ukraine.
• The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant had to rely on emergency generators after Russian shelling disrupted its power supply, Ukrainian state firm Energoatom said early Saturday. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) described security at the site, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, as “precarious.”
• The European Union said Russia’s seizure of the plant was “illegal, and legally null and void.” In a statement from foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, the bloc demanded that Russia “fully withdraw its military forces and equipment and hand back control of the NPP to its rightful owner, Ukraine.” The bloc, which is considering Ukraine’s application to join, has not recognized the Kremlin’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions, including Zaporizhzhia.

• Ukrainian forces took back nearly 300 square miles in the country’s east this week, Zelensky said in his nightly address Friday, including in Luhansk, one of four Ukrainian regions that Russia claimed to annex.
• Ukrainian officials say they are exhuming bodies from two burial sites in the city of Lyman, which Kyiv’s troops have just recaptured from Russian forces in the eastern Donetsk region.
• The Russian-appointed administration in Kherson said it plans to evacuate families from the southern Ukrainian region, which Kyiv’s troops are fighting to recapture. Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the administration, told Russian media people would be sent to Crimea and Russia’s Rostov region “for the duration of the tough period” due to Ukrainian shelling….

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