Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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We will not go back.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

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It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

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The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

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It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

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Donald Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Until Adam Weighs In…

Until Adam Weighs In…

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This post is in: ,

Seems like there was in fact a boom today. From this:

Until Adam Weighs In...

To this:

KYIV, Ukraine — A giant explosion ripped across the Crimean Bridge, a strategic link between mainland Russia and Crimea, in what appeared to be a stunning blow early Saturday morning to a symbol of President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to control Ukraine.

I’m sure Adam will have something to say about this that will be vastly more useful than anything I can offer, but I thought we might want to talk about it here.

My only thought: It is clear from this event and from some other reported long distance strikes on Russian assets in several locations in Ukraine that the Ukrainian military is doing what’s been doing for a while: creating more problems for the Russian command than they can solve, either logistically or intellectually.

Beyond that, I have no expertise that would make my guesses on what has or might happen worth the pixels they’re switched onto.

So: let’s be exuberantly ignorant together! Chat about this or whatever…

Image: Alexxx1979, Kerch, Crimea Bridge, 2, May 2021

Reader Interactions

213Comments

  2. 2.

    Urza

    That is pretty definitively a truck bomb.  Not sure their left/right side driving but I think that came from the Crimea side.  There’s no pictures coming out of damage on that portion of the car bridge though, just the outside part that dropped, which did not appear to have any explosion damage.  Good timing hitting the train, probably planned with the train schedule.

  3. 3.

    Ohio Mom

    This is the first war I can think of where I feel like my country is on the right side of, the first “good war” in the sense of fighting the Axis in WWII was a good war.

  5. 5.

    dmsilev

    I’ve seen some reports on Twitter that the Russians have sent at least lightly-loaded test trains over the damaged rail areas, so it might not be the crippling blow to their logistics that we could have hoped for. Of course, lightly loaded test trains and fully laden supply trains are two different stories, so we’ll just have to see.

    Still a massive blow to Putin’s prestige if nothing else.

  7. 7.

    counterfactual

    @dmsilev: I haven’t seen footage yet, though they are letting one lane of cars/trucks through. They’d managed to pull off part of the train that wasn’t burned.

  10. 10.

    NetheadJay

    Scandinavian here, so I’ve been enjoying this news for a while since it emerged. Sent the moment of explosion and a couple of other videos to a military friend (we’ve been talking fairly frequently since all this started) and he replied back “nicely done” followed by some technical speculation that I’ll let stay private.

    There’s another UA attack news item that’s not quite as much play (yet), but could arguably be very significant too. All in all  I think today is a good day.

  13. 13.

    Geminid

    @dmsilev: It will be a blow to Russian morale generally, and in Crimea in particular. Thats on top of supply shortfalls on the southern front

  14. 14.

    Frankensteinbeck

    What I got from the last Ukraine thread was that in military terms, the effectiveness of this strike depends on whether it rendered the railroad part of the bridge unusable in the mid-long term.  There’s no clear evidence, but if it is Dun Broked, then Russia’s supply system for the whole Southern theater is (for practical purposes) permanently gone.  So… cross your fingers?

  16. 16.

    dmsilev

    @Frankensteinbeck: From what I remember of the rail maps, there’s only one other rail line under Russian control that goes to the southern occupied lands, and that one is at several points within artillery/HIMARS range of the front lines and so is vulnerable.

  17. 17.

    Frankensteinbeck

    I do think that if Ukraine was able to hit the bridge once and the train tracks weren’t taken out, they’ll do it again.  If they’re at a stage where they want that bridge down, they’re competent enough and Russia is incompetent enough that it’s going down.

  21. 21.

    dmsilev

    Here’s a Tweet with the video of the test train:

     

    Russian repair crews have sent the first test train across the damaged section of the Crimean Bridge. A dozen passenger trains are scheduled to follow tonight, Transport Ministry officials say. A remarkable feat, given the footage of the damage from just hours ago. pic.twitter.com/O7N8QJNomk— Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock) October 8, 2022

    Some speculation that one track is still out of service so at least part of the bridge will be single-track. That by itself will substantially limit capacity.

  23. 23.

    trollhattan

    @Frankensteinbeck: Given there are two car-truck spans and one stands and is being used again, seems like an obvious followup target. But, the surprise aspect only works once.

    Curious whether the rail span is usable. All that heat may have done significant damage.

  24. 24.

    Geminid

    @WaterGirl: Hey Watergirl! Are you in the Illinois 11th CD now? I saw that Hakeem Jeffries came to Springfield Wednesday to campaign with Nikki Budzinski, the Democrat in the race.

  25. 25.

    Kirk Spencer

    Did they hit the supports, or just the spans? That’s what’ll determine if this is (in practical, not morale terms).

    Repairing spans is relatively fast and easy. Repairing – or better yet replacing – a support or two is a significant cost in time and effort.

  26. 26.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @trollhattan:

    Curious whether the rail span is usable.

    We won’t know until serious freight traffic is run over it.  If the rails are still physically there, Putin is not going to listen to anything except “We’ll have it back in full service tomorrow!”

  27. 27.

    Immanentize

    @WaterGirl: There were reports of a semi coordinated(?), timed attack on a Ruskie fuel dump NE of Kherson. Maybe that?

    And speaking of Scandinavians, if those guys n Finland are considered such:

    Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin was asked about a potential off-ramp for Russia to end the war in Ukraine. Her reply: pic.twitter.com/VblWxkMuFc— Rikhard Husu (@RikhardHusu) October 7, 2022

  28. 28.

    dmsilev

    @WaterGirl: Thanks. The alternative route is the one that starts at Zaporizhzhia and goes south from there. With the Ukrainian army advancing in the south, that line is not exactly safe. Maybe not easy for Ukraine to reach, but certainly closer by than this bridge….

  31. 31.

    MomSense

    I just want Ukraine to crush Putin.  In other news, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station was cut off from the grid again.  Cooling systems are now running on diesel generators.  There are a fuckton of spent fuel rods on site.

  33. 33.

    ian

    Could you imagine driving the truck that was right behind that?  Everything in front of you just randomly explodes.

  36. 36.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @HumboldtBlue:

    Olga says, “This is NATO’s fault! We should blow up Ukraine’s train lines they use to get military aid from America! This is a gift for Putin!”

    What an asshole. I wonder, for anyone with knowledge of these things, could Russia try to attack those train lines? I’m guessing those lines are well out of artillery range at this point from the front lines. Ukraine has excellent air defense capabilities from reading Adam’s posts/threads. Russia has been making improvements to air fields in Belarus to accommodate Iranian drones. Several western Ukrianian population centers are within range of these drones. Could they attack critical rail lines too? Artillery from Belarus?

  37. 37.

    Immanentize

    @MomSense: me too. It is a vision of what hope there might be in future leaders in this country once we exhaust the current “Olds in Office.”

    What makes that viddy for me is the PM’s turn and little giggle like, “what a dummy.”

  38. 38.

    Lyrebird

    @dmsilev:

     

    Here’s the source of the rail maps on the side of Carlo’s larger one.  Look at 06-00 and 07-00 for the northern and eastern edges of Ukrainian territory.  They show how much of a hassle it would be to get people or machines from Belgorod to Rostov as well as the connections to the Kerch Straits.  Also, 06-03 has Krasnodar.  At the time the map was made, the rail line is not all high capacity between Krasnodar and Novorossisk.

     

    @WaterGirl: Thanks WG!

  40. 40.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Immanentize:

    And speaking of Scandinavians, if those guys n Finland are considered such:

    Finns are a distinct ethnicity from Scandinavians, and Finnish is not a Scandinavian language.

  41. 41.

    MomSense

    @Immanentize:

    The problem is that we lost a generation (X) to the Reagan Revolution.  The coterie of insufferable middle aged GOP politicians like Cruz, Hawley, and Cotton are all Gen Xers.  They remind me of why high school was so miserable.

  42. 42.

    kalakal

    @dmsilev: Yep, you’re right. The rough distance of Ukranian front line positions is about 100km to the coast. Himars/MLRS have a range of about 90km. Most Russian transport East West is interdictable without the UA advancing a foot. That bridge is vital to the Russians. If as someone said it’s down to single line traffic that alone will cripple them. How damaged is it, how repairable is it are the biggies

  47. 47.

    NetheadJay

    @WaterGirl: It’s from encrypted chat so can’t really link but it’s about an airfield and logistics place in the Kherson larger area. I’ll come back something more specific comes across.

  48. 48.

    kalakal

    It occurs to me that the perfect next event is that the Russians do some bodged repairs, get a line(s) open, start running trains as fast and loaded up as they can and the weakened/repaired structure collapses under the overload.

    It really would be perfect

  50. 50.

    Immanentize

    @MomSense: When the vast majority of political leaders are older, the idea that music, sex, fun, drugs, dancing, etc. are a real part of the human lived condition gets buried under a mass of grumpy grey admonishments.

    Old lady judges watch people in pairs
    Limited in sex, they dare
    To push fake morals, insult and stare
    While money doesn’t talk, it swears
    Obscenity, who really cares
    Propaganda, all is phony

  52. 52.

    Jay

    And here we go. "Police sources: one victim is Valeriy Tarasenko, the ex-business partner of Inna Yashchyshy, who infiltrated Mar-a-Lago and Donald Trump's circle by posing as a member of the Rothschild banking dynasty." t.co/go4KnwoIz4— Les Perreaux (@perreaux) October 7, 2022

    Three shooting victims at a low-rent resort north of Montreal and three shooters "who escaped in a black SUV." Trois personnes blessées dans une fusillade à l’Estérel t.co/bpZG5eVRao— Les Perreaux (@perreaux) October 7, 2022

  56. 56.

    TaMara

    @dmsilev: I’m skeptical of that tweet. The author has hidden all tweets that say the video is suspect and has now closed down comments to only people mentioned in the tweet (no one).

    That feels like he’s spreading propaganda.  But not sure, of course.

  60. 60.

    Alison Rose 💙🌻💛

    Oh, I cackled so loud. From Zelenskyy’s FB post with his nightly address:

    Today on the territory of our state was a good and rather sunny day. There are about 20 degrees of heat and sun in a large area.

    Unfortunately, it was cloudy in Crimea. It’s warm as well though.

    I fucking love these people. I am so proud to have Ukrainian heritage.

  64. 64.

    What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @HumboldtBlue: Finns are considered a Nordic country culturally as are I think Sweden and Norway. Scandinavian is Sweden, Norway and Denmark as all three languages are closely related. Finnish is a completely different language group from the Scandinavian languages as you noted.

  65. 65.

    Martin

    @trollhattan: Unlikely. Though I suspect repairs to the bridge won’t take that long.

    From the video of the explosion, best guess is that a boat/semi-submersible detonated underneath the span timed to coincide with the train crossing. It lifted several road spans off of the supports and probably derailed the train (was wondering why the train stopped) and started the fire.

    If this is what happened and the supports are fine, then replacing the decks won’t be that hard – even in the case of the rail spans. And Russia won’t particularly care about how safe that rail span is provided they limit traffic to military supply. They’ll care a bit more about the road spans since there’s civilian traffic on that and they need to maintain at least a veneer of public support.

    But, my guess is that Ukraine has a bunch of new information on how the bridge is vulnerable, and there’s an established weak point on the rail structure they can try and target again. Russia is going to have to steer even more resources into protecting the bridge.

    If I’m Ukraine, I desperately want to be in Melitopol ASAP. Ultimately this was an event that happened at the time of their choosing, so I can’t imagine it sits in isolation of other plans – be it follow up attacks on the bridge or Crimean infrastructure, shifting that eastern offensive to the south, surging the offensive in Kherson, etc. I guess it could be more defensive – if Russia was planning on surging conscripts into Kherson across that bridge, this stops that effort for a week or two, which might buy them enough time to push Russia across the river.

  69. 69.

    West of the Rockies

    If it was a boat or truck explosion, that would mean suicide bomber, no?  Wouldn’t that be a big, new twist on how Ukraine conducts its military efforts?

  72. 72.

    Mallard Filmore

    @Frankensteinbeck: If the rails are still physically there, Putin is not going to listen to anything except “We’ll have it back in full service tomorrow! It’ll buff right out.”

  74. 74.

    dmsilev

    @TaMara: Hope you’re right.
    It’ll really come down to whether the structure of the rail bridge was badly damaged or just the rails themselves. The latter is fast to replace; the Russian army has a lot of experience doing that (corrupt, yes, but not completely stupid). Structural steel girders are a bit more difficult to deal with.

  76. 76.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @HumboldtBlue:

    Wow, the russians have lost over 62000 personnel and around 2500 tanks. That’s a lot of tanks lost! That 62000 figure is more than the US lost during the span of American involvement in the Vietnam War

  77. 77.

    trollhattan

    @West of the Rockies:

    An autonomous remote-driven truck seems like fantasy; a remote-controlled boat/sub sounds at least possible.

    Russia did/does have a lot of security in place and the boat scheme sounds difficult to accomplish.

  80. 80.

    Martin

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Rail infrastructure is some of the first stuff you target. If Russia could blow up Ukrainian rail infrastructure, they would have done it in February.

    The challenge with hitting rail lines is that they’re kinda small, so you either need to be precise or voluminous. Russia appears unable to do either. It’s a good thing to target from air superiority – even old shitty munitions can reliably hit a train track that a fighter/bomber is flying along, but Russia doesn’t have air superiority.

    And rail isn’t all that hard to repair – I mean, it’s a 19th century technology. It’s steel and wood and shovels. So disrupting it is an ongoing process if you don’t hold the land/air. I’m sure Russia has been doing damage to rail, but none that can’t be repaired quickly. Probably no more than a day if they have the equipment/manpower.

    I mean, look at Russia continuing to attack civilians. If they could use their missiles and drones to hit Ukrainian forces that would be a VASTLY better use of them, but they seem unable to do that – so they point them at a city and take whatever they hit. They might do a bit better with Ukrainian drones, but I don’t get the sense they’re going to have a lot of those, and if Ukraine can show they can just repair the rail damage in a day, it doesn’t seem like a great return on investment.

  81. 81.

    Jinchi

    @Martin: best guess is that a boat/semi-submersible detonated underneath the span timed to coincide with the train crossing.

    I agree, the explosion appears to come from underneath. After the initial flash, smoke and debris seem to come from under the right side of the bridge and billow over the top of it (towards the bridge with the train on it). If anyone here is good at image processing, the effect can be seen better by applying an edge detector and enhancing the contrasts.

  82. 82.

    Geminid

     

     

    @West of the Rockies: Not neccesarily a suicide bomber. A trucker could stop his truck and get into a car driven by someone else. Someone could tie their boat to the bridge and get away in a dinghy.

  84. 84.

    steve g

    “Seems like there was in fact a boom today.”

    I’m just glad this wasn’t referring to what I momentarily feared it might be referring to.

  88. 88.

    Another Scott

    @WaterGirl:

    2 part thread:

    That’s massive for Ukraine — and clearly coordinated with the bridge strike.

    Destroying parts of that railway hub will further degrade logistics capability for the M14 highway (on the Mariupol/Melitopol line).

    Resupplying Kherson is going to be near impossible for Russia. 1/2 t.co/kohWVx4991

    — Angry Staffer 🌻 (@Angry_Staffer) October 8, 2022

    Twitter demands hyperbole and categorical statements that often don’t hold together a few hours later, but VVP is having a very, very unhappy birthday.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  90. 90.

    Martin

    @West of the Rockies: Truck yes, boat probably no. A remote controlled truck is technically possible but not practically so – you have to assume Russia has checkpoints that it would need to get through. Remote boats are pretty trivial.

    My guess would be a semi-submergible. It doesn’t dive like a submarine but it can remain just under the surface with a small surface profile (getting radio signals through water is hard, so you want your antennas up in the air) that can surface just before a detonation.

    Something like that mysterious craft that washed up near Sevastopol a few weeks ago.

  91. 91.

    OB-1

    Can anyone see a locomotive attached to the train on the bridge? It could have been decoupled and moved away after the explosion, I suppose, but there is also the possibility the rolling stock was parked there for some reason.

  92. 92.

    InMyRoom

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):  Those rail lines coming out of Poland have been hit. Livi can be reached by cruise missiles or bombers.

    Before the Ukrainians sank the ship, missiles were fired from it all across western Ukraine.

  93. 93.

    Another Scott

    @dmsilev:

    There are 2 rail tracks on the bridge – it’s quite possible that the tracks where the fire was are badly damaged, but the other tracks are relatively fine. As you say, it really depends on how much of the support structure was damaged.

    (They almost always have at least pairs of tracks/roads on these things so that repairs/maintenance can be done without shutting the whole thing down.)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  96. 96.

    Kent

    If the bridge is weakened, now would seem to be the time to target it further.  To push it over the edge.

    As for rail.  Martin is right.  It is incredibly fast and easy to repair damaged rail lines on land.  Just push some more gravel into the spot, drop in some new ties, and new rails.  Any railroad has a big surplus of that sort of material and plenty of people who know how to do the work.  And there isn’t much to demolish in the first place as railroad roadbeds are mostly just a bed of heavy gravel laying on the ground.

    I expect the place that rail lines are most vulnerable are (1) bridges, (2) mountainside cuts, and (3) tunnels.  Ukraine pretty much only has bridges.  It is too flat to have much in the way of narrow passes where massive rock slides can take out infrastructure for months.  And probably not much in the way of tunnels that can be blown up requiring months of excavation.

    So bridges would be the logical target and soft spot.

  97. 97.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Martin:

    Rail infrastructure is some of the first stuff you target.

    We all saw that RU has no compunction about attacking train stations: they murdered 72 innocent civilians (trying to evacuate west) at the Kramatorsk train station back in April.

  99. 99.

    Martin

    @Another Scott: Yeah. This attack will slow supplies coming into Crimea for about a week (they can still get some trucks through, they can ferry, they can fly in) but none of those can compete with rail in terms of volume.

    I’d guess they get rail back up and running in 2 weeks unless the damage is worse than it looks, and flow of resources will grow throughout that time. If multiple supports on rail are damaged, that will take a lot longer. If it’s just one, they can probably work around that (I suspect the supports are fine). If Russia’s engineering capability is still intact, this is just a short term setback. Bad PR and morale, and their intent of treating Crimea as a normally functioning part of the country is probably done for – that’s the bigger damage. We’ll see what Ukraine does with the bit of time they just bought.

    My guess is the US/China would wrap the supports in carbon fiber to shore them up, replace the decks, and move on. That’d be 2 weeks for the US, 2 days for China, but I don’t know Russias ability to do that sort of thing.

  101. 101.

    Geminid

    @Martin: The drones that Iran has supplied Russia are very accurate and many are used against military targets. Ukrainian soldier Adrianna Arekhta described this in a Politico article from last month titled “‘Huge problem.’ Iranian drones pose new threat to Ukraine.”

    Ms. Arekhta was part of a delegation of soldiers visiting DC to lobby for equipment to combat the drones. Radar detection is a particular problem, she said. The US arms package announced since her visit included 20 radar units suited for detecting smaller air threats like drones.

    Iran has supplied both kamikaze drones and loitering drones that can drop guided munitions. Arekhta said one of the latter destroyed two tanks in her unit.

  102. 102.

    Martin

    @Chetan Murthy: And yet they didn’t actually disrupt that rail line for more than a day. Killing the civilians was the point – not slowing down rail traffic. If you want to slow rail traffic, you target junctions. Switches are harder to replace than plain rail, and you slow down more stuff. Ideally you target freight yards because in a lot of cases destroying the stuff on the train is more valuable than destroying the rail itself – and the compactness of yards means that you can do a lot more damage and slow down the loading/unloading of goods even more.

    But that attack on Kramatorsk achieved no military benefit at all.

  108. 108.

    Kelly

    @Kent: Pretty sure the explosives were under the road span. Very little debris or damage on top of remaining road spans. In the video it looks to me like the debris cloud is shooting out from under the road span. Trucks are in the wrong place.

  109. 109.

    Jinchi

    @Kent: I think those were fuel cars and the train was apparently not moving at the time. The fireball was big enough to reach the train when the explosion happened. Winds were also blowing the flame and debris in the direction of the train after that.

  113. 113.

    BCHS Class of 1980

    @Martin:  Not at you in particular, but lotsa people keep saying “it doesn’t look that bad” and I must beg to differ. Several years ago, a truck fire broke out underneath an overpass here in Tampa. It burned for a while and the entire overpass had to be replaced which took a couple of months. Extreme heat applied for a while can have very bad effects on both metal (melting, warping) and concrete (much less visible). It would be so Russian to slap a coat on it and declare it fixed (and they might) but that would be extremely dangerous, particularly for the materiel trains.

  117. 117.

    Roger Moore

    @Martin:

    From the video of the explosion, best guess is that a boat/semi-submersible detonated underneath the span timed to coincide with the train crossing.

    That seems wrong to me, just from a targeting perspective.  If the bomb were on a submersible, it would have the freedom to attack any of the bridge spans.  I’d think you’d want to target the rail bridge directly rather than blow up your bomb while it’s under the auto bridge furthest from the rail.  I realize that’s not decisive, but it makes inclined to believe it was a truck bomb, where they’d have much less freedom to pick their target.

  120. 120.

    trollhattan

    @BCHS Class of 1980: We had a similar thing here: gasoline tanker burned beneath an overpass and that overpass was out of commission for a year or more.

    No two incidents are alike–think it’s a question of the supporting steel’s integrity after being heated over a lengthy period.

  121. 121.

    Kelly

    @Roger Moore: A boat would explain why a close to the water surface span was targeted. I would expect a truck bomb to target a high spot, ideally the peak.

  122. 122.

    Roger Moore

    @Martin: ​
     

    And rail isn’t all that hard to repair – I mean, it’s a 19th century technology. It’s steel and wood and shovels. So disrupting it is an ongoing process if you don’t hold the land/air. I’m sure Russia has been doing damage to rail, but none that can’t be repaired quickly. Probably no more than a day if they have the equipment/manpower.

    As you said, repairing/replacing the rails is relatively straightforward unless you can damage a bridge or other critical structure. Union troops under Sherman were able to do irreparable damage to Confederate railroads only because they had the time to thoroughly destroy miles of track and because the Confederates didn’t have the industrial capacity to replace the track. During WWII, the preferred targets were things like bridges and the rolling stock, especially locomotives.

  127. 127.

    Another Scott

    @Roger Moore: +1

    There have been several comments about the roadway not having debris, etc., or there not being an obvious hole.

    This video at 1:08-1:10 or so shows 2 sections of the roadway have fallen into the sea (with a support between them still having some roadway draped over). I don’t see that being inconsistent with a truck bomb (and the hole(s) being on sections that fell into the sea).

    I would expect that if it were from a submersible/boat/etc., there would have been a huge cannonball-like splash. It’s hard to be sure, but it doesn’t seem that way to me.

    The russians say it was a truck bomb. Tractor trailers are big and lots of explosives can fit in a trailer. The russians apparently aren’t searching the trucks thoroughly. The train was stopped. The explosion happened right where you would want it to to hit the adjacent oil train. This fits with the bomb being constrained to the road – as you say, if it were a boat then just do it under the train. Similarly if it were a missile, just do the train.

    I think Occam’s razor gives us the answer.

    But we’ll see.

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  128. 128.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    Putin’s bridge is burning down
    Burning down, burning down
    Putin’s bridge is burning down
    My fair lady

    Iron bars will burn and break
    Burn and break, burn and break
    Iron bars will burn and break
    My fair lady

  129. 129.

    Mike in NC

    I was very disappointed when they put up a new bridge across the Potomac and still named it after that shitbird Woodrow Wilson.

  130. 130.

    WaterGirl

    @Geminid: I’m actually not sure.  I have always been in Il-13, but I am not sure whether I am in IL-11 or IL-15 come November.

    I can’t find a single site that tells me what district I will be in based on my address.  Everything I find tells me I’m  IL-13, but I won’t be that in November.

    I get very annoying on-line ads for Nikki Budzinski – they are doing those very badly.  Every single anything I try to reach on youtube makes me sit through the same ad over and over again.  And it’s a dumb ad

    edit: well, i did find one, but it spins and spins and spins and never finishes.

  131. 131.

    Another Scott

    @trollhattan: Thanks for that.

    I see there’s a 3rd section of damaged roadway, down at the bottom-left of the picture.  There may be other damage that isn’t showing up in the picture, also too.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  134. 134.

    Geminid

    @Ksmiami: I think the Russians pick up the drones with cargo planes. Someone would have to shoot them down. And Iran’s supply chain would be hard to disrupt. They’ve been developing drones since the 1990s and have learned to produce them in quantity despite sanctions.

    The Shahed-136 kamikaze drone has a range of 2000 kilometers. They are delta winged craft with a rear pusher-propeller. They have rocket assisted takeoff, and a truck-mounted launcher can fire five in succession.

  141. 141.

    trollhattan

    @Another Scott: Given that live videos from both directions show a truck, in motion, that’s there and then boom, not, best assumption seems to be it carried the bomb.

    They can simply have taken their tricks from the drug smuggler playbook and hidden high explosives in bed cavities and passed the visual inspection Russia was conducting. No bomb-sniffing dogs, evidently. Patron chuckles.

  145. 145.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @trollhattan: Curious whether the rail span is usable. All that heat may have done significant damage.

    It’s Russia, the answer is “it’s still up” and will drive trains over it anyway.

  146. 146.

    dirge

    @Roger Moore:

    If it’s a waterborne device, you target the road span because it’s much closer to the water, giving you a close range, partially contained explosion, for a huge increase in bang for the buck.

    Given the height of the railway, you’d want to launch something up to it, greatly increasing complexity and risk of failure.

  147. 147.

    Anonymous At Work

    @trollhattan: I saw that one, Naval Demo Team planting a crap ton but not taking out a few pylons seems odd.  Missile with targeting from Naval Demo maybe.  A lot of bang, so a suicide drone would be fairly large.

  148. 148.

    Geminid

    @WaterGirl: No yard signs in the neighborhood? I guess you’ll find out election day at the latest.

    The 11th is a cleverly drawn district. It extends from the Mississippi, across from St. Louis, through Springfield and on to Champagne. The 13th CD wraps around it on the north, west, and south.

  149. 149.

    patrick II

    I just went to YouTube to listen to hear what Jake Broe had to say about the bridge, Justhad. Jake was talking about how many of the people explaining the was to us have been de-monetized by YouTube. I do not know how Youtube decides who gets inform . us. but the ones I look ot (including Jake) have how very informative,

  150. 150.

    Geminid

    @Ksmiami: We and the Israelis did damage some of Iran’s uranium centrifuges a few years ago, with the Stuxnet virus. It made the centrifuges spin so fast they disintegrated.

    They’ve probably taken care to secure systems at critical facilities since then. But I know little about the ways and means of cyber attacks.

  152. 152.

    Martin

    @BCHS Class of 1980: Yes, but that’s because the US has standards, and this is peacetime.

    If you need to run war supplies, you run war supplies. If a rail engineer dies, that’s just a war casualty. And to be fair, the US would do the same thing. We wouldn’t consider it acceptable to run a fuel tanker down I-95 if it was covered with IEDs, but we sure as shit did that in Iraq.

    And to be even more fair, most people don’t realize that the way the US deals with our failing bridge infrastructure is to simply downgrade the bridge (bridge sufficiency rating). The one that could handle 40T loads gets knocked back to 20T, then 6T and is only suitable for passenger cars. That’s because the bridge is inching closer to falling down. We normally rate the load of a bridge at 55% of its calculated load, but the military doesn’t bother with the safety margin.

    In the case of the overpass, tunnel fires are MUCH worse than bridge fires because of the concentration of heat. Bridges tend to weather fires a lot better provided they aren’t under the bridge. They may see a lot of spalling but that tends to be fairly cosmetic. If the deck sustained damage, that’s not that hard to shore up or replace. If the supports sustained damage, that’s a different matter, but bridge support in water are almost impossible to damage with heat because of how readily the water will remove that heat. Even if they suffer spalling and some weakness, that can be remedied. Here in CA after the Northridge quake we figured out that wrapping bridge columns with carbon fiber was both an effective temporarily measure to shore up a damaged column until we could replace it and a way to remedy a design shortcoming for a support that would mushroom during a vertical load. You could install those in a day or two provided you had the materials.

    They’ve already run a train over the bridge. It’s short and slow moving, but some capacity is already restored. The road deck that is still open can handle one car at a time, but if Russia can get a crane out there, they can cannibalize one direction of traffic, use the structurally sound spans to restore one direction, while they wait for new decks to be fabricated. Depending on their ability to drop everything to do this, they can probably have new decks in place in 2 weeks. I mean, the bridge is 4 years old – not only do they have the plans, they probably still have the crew that built it.

  154. 154.

    Geminid

    @WaterGirl: Sorry, I got the district number wrong. Ms. Budzinski is running in the 13th district. She and Republican Regen Deering debated in Urbana a couple days ago

    The new 13th runs from East St. Louis to Champagne. The 15th district wraps around it.

  156. 156.

    Martin

    @charon: I know that’s the report and I take them at their word, but I’m surprised to see a ballasted deck with wooden ties on such a modern and large bridge. It does look like they’re on a bridge, but modern rail design – particularly for higher speed rail, which might be why they didn’t do this – does away with wood ties and ballast (gravel) for directly attaching rails to concrete. It’s harder to do (again, why they might not have done it) but it lasts longer and is better for the trains over time because it maintains its geometry better – the tracks don’t meander as much. Also lighter to build so easier to build a bridge around it.

  158. 158.

    WaterGirl

    @Geminid: I thought my ballot might arrive today, and it did.  Nikki B. is on it.  So I guess I’m still in IL-13.  I really thought I was changing.

    For awhile, the line between districts ran right down the middle of my street, so I was in a different district than my neighbor right across the street.  Pissed me off because I had voted at this nice little church where I would see my neighbors voting, and suddenly I was in some strange church in the other direction, and I never knew a soul.  Voting has never felt the same again.

  165. 165.

    Geminid

    @WaterGirl: Democrats in the Illinois legislature moved the district lines with the intent of having it elect a Democrat. I think they shifted the western end south so as to include more of the St. Louis metropolitan area. It’s still thought to be a close race, though.

    Budzinski sounds like she’d make a good representative. After a while, you won’t even miss Rodney Davis!

  166. 166.

    HumboldtBlue

    What the hell? James Carville making sense again.

    Jennings: I think they see Joe Biden is weak
    Carville: You know who doesn’t think Biden is weak? Vladimir Putin. The Republican Hero. The man that the Republican Party worships is getting the crap kicked out of him right now with US Support and Biden-led coalition

  168. 168.

    WaterGirl

    @Geminid: I will continue to keep my UnSeat Rodney Davis magnet on my car as a badge of honor.

    Such a shame he lost the primary. //

    *Unless Mary Miller is more evil/awful than he is.

  170. 170.

    WaterGirl

    @Geminid: Her ads make me want to scream because they are so lame, so she must be trying to get conservative people to vote for her.  The ad I had to watch about 7 fucking times in one day was so lame, about families being able to go out for ice cream as a treat, and not have to worry about spending money on “every little thing.”

    The world is on fire and that’s what she chooses to hang her hat on?  Her ad buys are awful – she should not be making the same fucking people watch the same fucking ads over and over and over.

    edit:  I did, however, watch Rev. Warnock ad all the way through today.  Happily.

  174. 174.

    Baud

    @WaterGirl:

    There is precedent you know, with T**** and Pence.

     
    That comparison isn’t apt. I have complete confidence that you would overthrow democracy for me.

  175. 175.

    dirge

    @Another Scott: I think it’s the 3rd road section farther away from the blast site

    If you look closely towards the center, you can see the edge of the section of bridge that’s buckled over the pylon.  So I think we’re looking at the presumptive blast site here.

    Doesn’t look like enough damage underneath that span to support my pet theory involving a naval drone.

  177. 177.

    Princess

    I’ve been looking at photos and until I see footage of Russia running a train across that span, as they claim they did, or cars crossing, well, I’ll believe it when I see it. I think they’re making these claims to keep Crimea and their people in Kherson calm but it feels very “the Moskva got caught in a bad storm and we’re towing her to port” to me.

    ETA the footage linked above could be taken literally anywhere.

  178. 178.

    Geminid

    @WaterGirl: Inflation is probably the biggest attack line Republicans have this year. I don’t think Democrats can ignore it.

    Budzinski probably is not trying to get conservatives to vote for her, but rather moderates and Independents. Like it or not, those people make the difference in purple districts.

    Such messaging drives some liberals crazy, but they are not the target audience. Maybe Budzinski will mix in some more partisan ads as the election gets closer.

    I get what you are saying about repetitive ads, though.

  182. 182.

    Another Scott

    @dirge: Good eye!

    Looking more carefully, I can see a hole in the closer section on the right, just above the waterline.  I can believe that there may be evidence that the ‘spars’, etc., are bending downward (away from the asphalt), but it’s just a guess as I’m no expert on this stuff.

    Maybe OO will chime in eventually.

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  186. 186.

    Timill

    @Martin: I think what we’re looking at there is a train passing dead slow on the other, undamaged, track. Ie, the photographer is standing on the damaged track.

    Those appear to be concrete ties (shaped ends) rather than wood (usually cut square) on regular rock ballast.

    The Russians are going to have fun: as far as I  can see in Google Maps, there are no crossovers anywhere on the bridge or near the ends, so they’ll be operating a 15-mile single line for a while yet.

  187. 187.

    Geminid

    @WaterGirl: Actually, Mary Miller is worse than Rodney Davis, I think. But Davis would vote for a Republican Speaker so in that respect he’s equally bad.

    Davis lost even though he had the endorsement of almost all the district’s GOP county chairmen. A good example of how the Republican establishment has lost control to the radicals.

  188. 188.

    frosty

    @Baud: I have complete confidence that you would overthrow democracy for me.

    I just have to drop this here that I get at least one chuckle a day from you. This one was excellent! Totally didn’t see it coming.

  193. 193.

    dirge

    @Another Scott:

    It looks like the span we’re looking at was hit from the top/right with a giant hatchet, driving it down and shearing it in the center, bouncing the ends up off their pylons, and pulling adjacent spans in towards the impact.  On the side directly across, the next span over is yanked towards us and falls off off the next pylon.  Behind us, three or four spans remain attached, but the next falls off it’s pylon as well. Clearer in some more recent satellite images.

    Unclear what sort of device would do that (assuming no giant hatchet), but it’s a very big one compared to HIMARS punching holes in the Antonovsky Bridge.  I think ATACMS is only about twice the power of GMLRS.

  194. 194.

    zhena gogolia

    @jeffreyw: I keep thinking you said “I’m learning to truck bomb.” And I get nervous, knowing how good you are at everything.

  195. 195.

    Carlo Graziani

    I really don’t like the boat hypothesis, for two reasons:

    (1) The Russians monitor the living shit out of those waters, above and below, patrols and sensors, and if you think it would be easy to sneak a motorboat full of explosives under the bridge, you are invited to try it. I think you would die of gunshot wounds while still over a mile away;

    (2) The reason people started talking about a boat is that there was one under the roadway span in a CCTV frame, before the explosion. But if you had a boat, and had succeeded in getting it under the bridge, and intended to take down the railway span, why would you detonate it under the roadway span? That makes zero sense. Most of the explosive energy was absorbed by the wrong span, which would actually have protected the railway span in the boat scenario. You would richly deserve the Bonehead Terrorist Of The Year Award;

    As to the truck hypothesis, there is no need for a robot driver or a suicide volunteer. You register a company in Crimea that requires truck shipments from Russia. You hire a Russian driver who knows nothing. You arrange 5 or 6 legitimste shipments, with the same driver, with the truck wired for video and sound, so you can check out the bridge security inspections, and meanwhile bridge security can get used to the driver. Then, when you’re sure you have the security figured out and a method to get explosives past it, you send the driver on his final delivery, timing it (somehow) to coincide with the train, and detonate it when your sensor package tells you the time is right.

    Today, incidentally, there was no security — CCTV of the truck at the Taman inspection point shows an inspector opening the truck’s rear door, looking briefly inside without climbing in, and shutting it again. This is probably a pattern with familiar drivers, and in this scenario  the Ukrainians exploited it.

  200. 200.

    Carlo Graziani

    @Martin: Excellent, we have a real civil engineer in our midst.

    The satellite pictures show smoke blowing away from a section directly above a support pylon. We can presume that there was burning diesel pouring up and out of burst tanks, pooling in areas under the train, and eventually sheeting down over concrete structure, for many hours. Might rebar inside the concrete melt, or possibly expand differentially in different adjoining sections, cracking the concrete, especially near the top of the support (highest, most concentrated heat & farthest from water)?

  201. 201.

    dirge

    @Carlo Graziani: I really don’t like the boat hypothesis

    I do like the boat hypothesis, primarily because it’s awesome.  I will grant that’s not a terribly persuasive argument.  I was never convinced, and evidence continues to stack up against.

    Still, not quite prepared to rule it out.  What we see may be consistent with a waterborne device if:

    • it’s waiting for the train, and has difficulty station keeping in the current, thus is to the right of the roadway in the footage we’ve seen, rather than ideally positioned.
    • it’s carrying an FAE, so the initial dispersion of fuel explains the wake that appears under the bridge, and the height of dispersion explains why the explosion appears to come from top right, and smacks the bridge down left.

    I’m not convinced, but it’s at least slightly plausible, and I like the idea that someone came up with a plan involving the naval drones we sent, loaded with a couple of captured TOS-1A warheads.

  204. 204.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Carlo Graziani: (1) The Russians monitor the living shit out of those waters

    The Russians claim to monitor the living shit out of those waters. There is has been an awful lot of claims like this the Russians turn out be lying about.   That’s the problem with wide spread corruption, it’s easier to lie about it than do the job.

  205. 205.

    Geminid

    @dirge: There are pictures out that were apparently taken today, from below the partially dropped span. The girders are clean, with no scorch or smoke marks. If the photos actually show what they purport to show, an explosion from a boat seems unlikely.

    But it is a neat idea! Like William Holden in The Bridge Over the River Kwai.

  206. 206.

    Miss Bianca

    @Immanentize: I too look forward to a time when we have young leaders as poised and ready to go as Finland’s PM. I must say, however, I’m also in no particular hurry to be patting older leaders like Pelosi or Joe B in the face with a spade, either.

    If it’s to come, ’twill come in due course.

    ETA: Oh, awk, COVID. So sorry to hear it!

  208. 208.

    dirge

    @Geminid: yeah, that particular photo underneath the span is probably the strongest evidence against a waterborne device.  Maybe doesn’t conclusively rule it out, but it’s very persuasive against.

  210. 210.

    Kelly

    @Carlo Graziani: Your point about sneaking a boat under the bridge is a very good one. My problem with the truck bomb hypothesis is in the video of the explosion one truck appears to me to be starting up the steeper slope of the arch while the other is between the camera and the boom. Neither truck looks to me like it’s where the boom happened.

  211. 211.

    Geminid

    @dirge: I also wonder if an explosion at water level could have done so much damage to the bridge span. Unless it was many tons of explosives or some sort of shaped charge it seems like the force would dissipate too much. But I bet there will be more definite evidence before too long. Right now I can only speculate.

    The timing is interesting. Was it just luck that the train’s fuel cars were adjacent to the explosion, or design? And why was the train stopped, and on a bridge? Maybe the Kyiv Post or Kyiv Independent will have the inside dope.

  212. 212.

    Jay

    @Miss Bianca:

    Quebec business records show a non-profit company, the United Hearts of Mercy, still registered at a downtown Montreal condo Tarasenko’s wife, Anna Kovalenko Tarasenko, sold this past June. The non-profit, created in 2010 and also called Coeurs unis de la miséricorde, lists Yaschyshyn as president and Kovalenko Tarasenko as treasurer. The vice-president is listed as Tatiana Verzilina, whom the Post-Gazette and OCCRP reported to be the certified public accountant of an organization in Florida also called United Hearts of Mercy.

    The Post-Gazette and OCCRP reported Verzilina alleged in a 2021 sworn statement, which was turned over to the FBI, the Florida-registered United Hearts of Mercy, now inactive, was a source of illicit funds for organized crime.

    montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/man-shot-in-esterel-had-met-with-fbi-about-ties-to-woman-who-gai…

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