Kerch Bridge attacked by SBU using underwater explosives, but reopens to traffic

Ukrainian operatives mounted a third attack on the Kerch Bridge on the morning of 3 June 2025, this time using underwater demolition charges.

The bridge, which links the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula with southern Russia to the east, is not only a key supply route for Russian forces but a symbol of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, which preceded the bridge’s construction.

The Kerch Bridge was first attacked in October 2022, when it was targeted with a truck bomb that killed at least three people and caused some mid-sections of the bridge to collapse into the Kerch Strait. A subsequent attack was launched in July 2023 using bomb-laden drones that killed two people.

Claiming the third attack, in which the equivalent of 1,100 kg of TNT was detonated against an underwater support at the Crimean end of the bridge, the chief of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Lieutenant General Vasyl Maliuk, stated on social media, “God loves the Trinity, and the SBU always brings what is conceived to the end and never repeats itself. Previously, we struck the Crimean Bridge in 2022 and 2023. So today we continued this tradition underwater.”

While the Kerch Bridge was closed to traffic in the hours immediately after the attack, no doubt to allow any damage to be inspected, traffic had resumed by the afternoon of 3 June.

This latest Ketch Bridge attack followed an audacious Ukrainian operation on 1 June in which around 40 Russian strategic bombers, including some at bases thousands of kilometres from Ukraine, were critically damaged or destroyed by FPV drones that had been hidden in the roofs of mobile homes transported by trucks.