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It is increasingly clear that the destruction of part of the Kerch-Crimea bridge and the destruction of three strands of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines required highly sophisticated technology and the skill of secret operators.
According to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) investigation, the truck bomb that destroyed part of the Kerch Strait Crimea bridge “was concealed in 22 pallets of plastic film rolls weighing a total of 22,770 kilos.”
The Russians blame the Secret Service of Ukraine (SSU), but Kiev would have needed considerable professional help to design such a huge weapon. The biggest bunker buster in the US inventory, for example, is the GBU-57 A/B at 14,000 kilograms. Experts would have known that to knock out the bridge they needed something even more powerful.
The investigative journalism site Greyzone said on October 10 that the British Secret Service (MI-6) drew up a plan last April to blow up the Kerch Bridge and shared the plan with Ukraine.
As Greyzone reported, the British plan was to bring in explosives by sea, perhaps using underwater vehicles or divers, and blow away the main bridge supports. An alternative, the British allegedly recommended, was to use cruise missiles – but doing so would remove any possibility of plausible deniability.
The Russians may have known about the plan. Interestingly, they positioned a special force to guard against an underwater attack and moved an S-300 air defense system from Syria to Crimea to deal with a possible cruise missile strike.
Assuming Greyzone is accurate, the Russian countermeasures forced an alternative plan. Perhaps, though with no evidence yet to support the thesis, UK or US experts were commissioned to determine the scale of the explosion needed to blow the bridge from the roadway.
For the record, Ukrainian cruise missiles lack both the accuracy and destructive power needed for such an attack. HIMARS, which has been supplied to Ukraine, might be capable of damaging the bridge (but not destroying it) and is accurate.
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