Live: Traffic resumes over blast-hit Kerch bridge linking Crimea and Russia

Issued on: 09/10/2022 – 08:01

7:52am: More than a dozen killed in overnight shelling of city of Zaporizhzhia

At least 17 people were killed in an overnight shelling in the city of Zaporizhzhia in southeast Ukraine, local official Anatoliy Kurtev said early on Sunday.

“As a result of an overnight missile attack on Zaporizhzhia, apartment buildings and roads in a residential area of the city have been damaged,” Kurtev, the secretary of the city’s administration, wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

“At this time, 17 people are known to have died,” he said.

7:41am: Traffic resumes over blast-hit Kerch bridge between Crimea and Russia

Traffic resumed Saturday over the Kerch bridge linking Russia with Crimea after it was damaged by an explosion Moscow blamed on a truck bomb.

The 19-kilometre (12-mile) bridge was hit by a blast around dawn on Saturday, killing three people, setting several oil tankers ablaze and collapsing two car lanes, Russian investigators said.

The explosion drew celebrations from Ukrainians and others on social media, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made no direct mention of it in his nightly address and officials made no claim of responsibility.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin told reporters “traffic has been fully restored” on the bridge’s railway, according to state news agency Ria Novosti, without specifying when operations resumed.

Khusnullin had confirmed the resumption is for “both freight and passenger traffic” in an earlier post on Telegram, and said one of the destroyed lanes would be restored “in the near future”.

Limited road traffic resumed about 10 hours after Saturday’s blast, Reuters reported.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and Reuters)