Russia-Ukraine war live: three killed as huge explosion causes key Crimea-Russia road bridge to collapse | Ukraine

Phillip Inman

Fears that Russia is navigating its way around sanctions are unfounded, according to experts who say Moscow is suffering a bigger hit than institutions such as the World Bank have been predicting.

Some analysts have interpreted the strength of the rouble, the size of the warchest of cash available to Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin’s ability to redirect exports destined for Europe to willing southern neighbours as a signal that the arsenal of sanctions deployed against Moscow is failing to bite.

But the economist Mikhail Mamonov thinks otherwise. He was part of a team that modelled the Russian economy in 2014. It measured the impact of sanctions in the wake of Putin’s annexation of Crimea, and revealed that even the minimal financial and trade blockade imposed at the time had had an impact.”

The time in Kyiv is 6pm. Here is a round-up of the day’s headlines so far:

• Three people were killed after a truck bomb caused a fire and the collapse of a section of a bridge linking Russia with Crimea, Russian officials said. Russia’s national anti-terrorism committee said the truck bomb set alight seven railway carriages carrying fuel, resulting in a “partial collapse of two sections of the bridge.

• Meanwhile, Russia’s defence ministry said Russian troops fighting in the Mykolaiv, Kryvyi Rih and Zaporizhzhia regions of southern Ukraine could receive all the supplies they needed via existing land and sea corridors. Saturday’s explosion on the road-and-rail bridge, which has been used to take Russian personnel and military supplies through the peninsula into other parts of southern Ukraine, brought down sections of road taking traffic in one direction and also damaged railway tracks.

• The parliamentary leader of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s party has stopped short of claiming that Kyiv was responsible for the Kerch bridge explosion but appeared to cast it as a consequence of Moscow’s takeover of Crimea and attempts to integrate the peninsula with the Russian mainland. “Russian illegal construction is starting to fall apart and catch fire. The reason is simple: if you build something explosive, then sooner or later it will explode,” David Arakhamia, the leader of the Servant of the People party, wrote on Telegram.

• The series of explosions that rocked Kharkiv early on Saturday sparked a fire at one of the city’s medical institutions, the mayor of the eastern Ukrainian city said. Ihor Terekhov said on Telegram that the explosions were the result of missile strikes in the city centre, Associated Press reported. They also sparked a fire in a non-residential building.

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy says Russian officials have begun to “prepare their society” for the possible use of nuclear weapons in the war. The Ukrainian president denied having called for strikes on Russia, urging instead that pre-emptive sanctions be imposed on Moscow, in an interview with the BBC.

• Russia has targeted Zaporizhzhia with explosive-packed “kamikaze drones” for the first time, as the death toll from a missile strike on an apartment building in the city rose to 11. The regional governor, Oleksandr Starukh, said Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones damaged two infrastructure facilities in the city. He said other missiles also struck the city again, injuring one person. The Iranian foreign ministry has denied supplying the drones to Russia.

• Russia has named a new senior commander of Russian forces in Ukraine. Sergei Surovikin, the former commander of Russia’s operations in Syria, is “a notoriously corrupt and brutal general even by the Russian army’s standards, according to the UK MoD”, reports the FT’s Moscow bureau chief.

• The German defence minister has told Nato it must do more to bolster security, warning: “We cannot know how far Putin’s delusions of grandeur can go.” Christine Lambrecht said Germany had heard of Russian threats to Lithuania for implementing EU sanctions and that they must be taken seriously and be prepared, reports Reuters.

• The UN atomic watchdog has renewed calls for a protection zone at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, condemning overnight shelling on its power line as “tremendously irresponsible”. The shelling cut the power line that supplies cooling systems to the Russian-held plant, reports Reuters.

• The UK has rejected Moscow’s call for a secret ballot in the United Nations general assembly next week on whether to condemn Russia’s move to annex four regions in Ukraine and requested that the 193-member body vote publicly. Reuters reports that the general assembly is set to vote on a draft resolution that would condemn Russia’s “illegal so-called referenda” and the “attempted illegal annexation”.

• Vladimir Putin marked his 70th birthday on Friday with little fanfare, amid further signs that key parts of the Russian president’s invasion of Ukraine were unravelling and triggering unprecedented criticism at home, Reuters reports. News programs made only passing references to the birthday and public events were low-key, in contrast to just a week ago when Putin held a huge concert on Red Square to proclaim the annexation of nearly a fifth of Ukrainian land.

That’s it from me, Tom Ambrose, for today. My colleague Nadeem Badshah will be along shortly to continue bringing you all the latest news from Ukraine.

Russia has named a new senior commander of Russian forces in Ukraine.

Sergei Surovikin, the former commander of Russia’s operations in Syria, is “a notoriously corrupt and brutal general even by the Russian army’s standards, according to the UK MoD”, reports the FT’s Moscow bureau chief.