Crimean Bridge security cam footage showing the moment a part of the bridge was blown up in a terrorist attack by Ukraine. Photo: Sputnik.
By Ilya Tsukanov – Jul 9, 2023
The October 8, 2022 attack on the Crimean Bridge was a ‘crossing the Rubicon’ moment in the Ukrainian crisis, freeing Moscow’s hands to lift self-imposed restrictions on precision missile strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure. Why has Kiev decided to admit responsibility now?
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar admitted on Saturday [July 8] that Ukraine was responsible for last year’s attack on the Crimean Bridge.
“273 days ago we delivered our first strike against the Crimean Bridge in order to disrupt Russia’s logistics,” Maliar wrote in a Telegram post on Kiev’s “accomplishments” over the course of the conflict as it hit the 500-day mark.
Her statement contradicts months of denials by officials in Kiev that Ukraine had anything to do with the terrorist attack. “We definitely did not order that, as far as I know,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview with Western media in October 2022 after Russia began a series of missile strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure following the attack on the Crimean Bridge. Kiev and its allies in the West alternated between blaming feuding Russian internal sectors and claiming that Moscow bombed its own bridge in a false flag attack, but Maliar’s confession confirms what Russia has been saying all along: that the terrorist attack was ordered, concocted and carried out by Ukraineian security services.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova responded to Kiev’s admission of guilt with two words, calling the Ukrainian government a “terrorist regime.”
Timing no accident
“The timing of the deputy defense minister’s admission is most likely not an accident,” Dr. Joe Siracusa, a US politics expert and dean of Global Futures at Curtin University in Australia, told Sputnik, pointing out that the confession comes just days ahead of next week’s NATO summit in Vilnius.
“Rather it is designed to put maximum pressure on NATO members in the run up to the Vilnius Summit. Running out of ammunition, Ukraine is compelled to leverage whatever it can on sympathetic NATO members before the summit,” Siracusa said. “What’s next? I wouldn’t be surprised if Kiev [took] credit for blowing [up[ the Nord Stream pipelines.”
Confession is good for the soul?
Adriel Kasonta, a London-based foreign affairs analyst, journalist and commentator, said that in the space of 48 hours, Kiev and Washington have demonstrated, through Maliar’s confession, and the US announcement that it would be sending deadly cluster munitions to Ukraine, that they just do not care about even pretending to hold the “moral high ground” in the proxy war against Russia anymore.
“Everyone who is following what is happening in Ukraine since 2014 knew from the very start that it was the Ukrainian side that was behind the bombing of the Crimean Bridge,” Kasonta told Sputnik. “Perhaps the Ukrainian side, because of the huge losses [in the ongoing counteroffensive] and the assurance from the American side… that Ukrainian fighters will be provided with cluster bombs, decided not to play this silly game of pretending that someone else is behind the terrorist attacks conducted throughout this conflict.”
Suggesting that Kiev’s Western benefactors have already achieved the goal of turning Ukraine into a foreign banker- and corporation-controlled vassal whose only purpose is to “weaken Russia,” Kasonta stated that officials in Ukrainian President Zelensky’s administration simply don’t “care anymore about pretending that they are the good guys.”
“So the mask fell off and everyone around the world [can] see this conflict for what it is,” he said.
Latest in a string of important admissions
Maliar’s statement is important, but it was certainly not the first time that Ukrainian officials have admitted to their role in escalating the conflict.
In January, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov acknowledged that the Ukrainian crisis is really a Russia-NATO proxy war, and that “today” Kiev is “carrying out NATO’s mission,” shedding its soldiers’ lives, and serving as a “shield…defending the entire civilized world, the entire West” from Russia.
In late 2022 and early 2023, Zelensky, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and former French President Francois Hollande each separately admitted that Kiev never intended to adhere to the terms of the 2015 Minsk peace deal with Russia, and that the agreement was signed only to buy time and prepare for a conflict with Russia.
Ilya Tsukanov is a Moscow-based correspondent specializing in Eastern European, US and Middle Eastern politics, Cold War history, energy security and military affairs. He is a member of the Sputnik team since the site’s inception in 2014.
(Sputnik)
