The Kremlin plans to demonstrate that the attack on the Crimean Bridge was not that serious and that the crucial lifeline from mainland Russia to the illegally annexed Crimean peninsula will soon be back to normal.
The physical damage can be repaired – Russia immediately dispatched a large emergency team to the site – but the damage to Russia’s prestige and, most importantly, to Vladimir Putin’s image, will not be so easy to repair.
This is to be bridge, to be project, built with the equivalent of nearly $4 billion from the Russian treasury. It is a symbolic “marriage bond” that unites Mother Russia and Ukraine, or at least a region that still legally belongs to Ukraine, crucial not only to Putin’s war effort, but also to his obsession with putting Ukraine back under Russia’s control. to bring.
Putin’s February 21 speech to the Russian people, delivered just before ordering the invasion of Ukraine, exposed his distorted view of history. Ukraine, he emphasizes, is not really an independent country: “Ukraine is not just a neighbor to us,” he claimed. “It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space.”
That speech, one of the most revealing of his presidency, makes clear that this fratricidal war against Ukraine is very personal to him. For years he was fixated on Peter the Great, the Russian Tsar who founded St. Petersburg, the city where Putin was born and raised. I once visited the city administration where Putin worked in the early 1990s after returning from his job as a KGB agent in East Germany. A portrait of Peter the Great hung on the wall above his desk.
In June of this year, as the lingering war in Ukraine entered its fourth month, Putin again compared himself to Peter the Great, insisting that Peter, who conquered land from Sweden, “return” to Russia what actually belonged to it.
Putin now apparently believes that Ukraine’s return to Russia is his historic destiny. He probably sees the horrific attack on the Crimean Bridge not only as an attack on the Russian homeland, but also as a personal insult. And he will probably react viciously.
A day after the attack, Russian troops are already bombing civilian apartment buildings in Ukraine. Putin’s hardline supporters push for more attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure. Western leaders warn that an increasingly frustrated Putin could resort to using tactical nuclear weapons. Military experts say he could retaliate asymmetrically by hitting unexpected targets.
Putin has had another obsession for years: punishing traitors. A month after his troops attacked Ukraine, he threatened to retaliate against all Russians who opposed the war, calling them “fifth column … national traitors” enslaved to the West.
This Sunday, the day after the bridge bombing, he called it a “terrorist attack” whose “authors, executors and masterminds” are Ukraine’s secret services… and “Russian citizens from abroad”.
One thing is clear: as the fighting gets closer to Russia, Vladimir Putin sees his “historic mission” jeopardized. And that means emotions can outweigh reason. For Ukraine, for Russians who are against the war, and for the world, this is a dangerous moment.