Large fire reported on key bridge linking Russia to Crimea

Russian state-backed media reported on Saturday that a fire broke out on the bridge linking mainland Russia with the Russian-controlled Crimean Peninsula, hours after powerful blasts rocked the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

RIA-Novosti and the Tass news agency quoted local Russian official Oleg Kryuchkov as saying an object thought to be a fuel storage tank caught fire and that traffic has been stopped on the bridge.

Images shared on social media purported to show fire and damage to the span. The authenticity of the reports and images couldn’t be immediately verified.

The crossing is a pair of road and rail bridges that Russia built after it seized and annexed Crimea from Ukraine in violation of international law in 2014.

The fire occurred hours after explosions rocked the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv early on Saturday, sending towering plumes of smoke into the sky and triggering a series of secondary explosions.

Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said on Telegram that the early-morning explosions were the result of missile strikes in the centre of the city. He said that the blasts sparked fires at one of the city’s medical institutions and a nonresidential building. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

The blasts came hours after Russia concentrated attacks in its increasingly troubled invasion of Ukraine on areas it illegally annexed, while the death toll from earlier missile strikes on apartment buildings in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia rose to 14.

On Friday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to human rights organisations in his Russia and Ukraine, and to an activist jailed in Belarus, an ally of Moscow.

Berit Reiss-Andersen, the committee’s chair, said the honour went to “three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence”, though it was widely seen as a rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his conduct of Europe’s worst armed conflict since World War II.

Putin this week illegally claimed four regions of Ukraine as Russian territory, including the Zaporizhzhia region that is home to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, whose reactors were shut down last month.