A drone attack on an ammunition depot in Crimea has prompted authorities to evacuate everyone within a 3-mile (5km) radius and briefly suspend road traffic on the bridge linking the peninsula to Russia, the Moscow-installed regional governor has said.
Sergei Aksyonov said on Saturday there was an explosion at the depot in Krasnohvardiiske in central Crimea, but he reported no damage or casualties. Footage shared by state media showed a thick cloud of grey smoke at the site.
Aksyonov blamed it on a Ukrainian drone attack. There was no immediate comment from Kyiv. The Guardian has not been able to independently verify the attack.
Russia seized and annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, eight years before launching its full-scale invasion of the country.
The brief halting of traffic on the Crimean Bridge, about 110 miles east of the drone incident, occurred five days after explosions on the bridge killed two people and damaged a section of roadway. It was the second major attack on the structure, also called the Kerch Bridge, since the start of the war.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said on Friday that the bridge was a legitimate target because it was a military supply route for Russia.
Meanwhile, the prominent Russian nationalist Igor Girkin, who publicly accused Vladimir Putin of not pursuing the war in Ukraine harshly or effectively enough, was remanded in custody on charges of inciting extremism.
Girkin, 52, a former Russian intelligence officer and leading military blogger, faces up to five years in prison if convicted of the charges, which are reported to centre on two statements he posted on the Telegram app.
On Saturday, the UK’s Ministry of Defence, in a regular intelligence update, said the arrest was “likely to infuriate fellow members of the military blogger community, who largely see Girkin as an astute military analyst and patriot”.
It follows an abortive mutiny last month led by another outspoken critic, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the boss of the Wagner mercenary group, who is still free but has sharply curtailed his own verbal attacks.
Girkin denies the accusations against him and is refusing to cooperate with investigators, according to reports.
Alexander Molokhov, his lawyer, told reporters he would appeal against the decision to remand his client in custody. The lawyer complained he had not been given enough time to familiarise himself with the charges, which he said amounted to a procedural violation.
In footage from court posted by the popular Telegram channel Shot, Girkin stood almost motionless in a glass cage, with his arms folded, staring straight ahead.
Police detained at least two of his supporters outside the court building, a Reuters reporter said. One of them had been repeating Girkin’s own criticisms of the war in Ukraine and another had been holding a sign saying: “The Truth is Power.”
Girkin, a former FSB officer and battlefield commander also known as Igor Strelkov, helped Russia to annex Crimea in 2014 and, soon after, to organise pro-Russian militias who wrested part of eastern Ukraine out of Kyiv’s control – events that started Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials and western human rights groups accused him of committing war crimes there, which he denied.
He was handed a life sentence in absentia by a Dutch court in 2022 for his alleged role in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, killing 298 passengers and crew. He denied wrongdoing at the time.
