Massive hearth reported on key bridge linking Russia to Crimea

KHARKIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian state-backed media reported Saturday {that a} hearth broke out on the bridge linking mainland Russia with the Russian-controlled Crimean Peninsula, hours after highly effective blasts rocked the japanese Ukrainian metropolis of Kharkiv.

RIA-Novosti and the Tass information company quoted native Russian official Oleg Kryuchkov as saying an object regarded as a gasoline storage tank caught hearth and that visitors has been stopped on the bridge.

Pictures shared on social media purported to point out hearth and harm to the span. The authenticity of the stories and pictures could not be instantly verified.

The crossing is a pair of street and rail bridges that Russia constructed after it seized and annexed Crimea from Ukraine in violation of worldwide regulation in 2014.

The fireplace occurred hours after explosions rocked the japanese Ukrainian metropolis of Kharkiv early Saturday, sending towering plumes of smoke into the sky and triggering a sequence of secondary explosions.

Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov stated on Telegram that the early-morning explosions had been the results of missile strikes within the middle of the town. He stated that the blasts sparked fires at one of many metropolis’s medical establishments and a nonresidential constructing. There have been no fast stories of casualties.

The blasts got here hours after Russia concentrated assaults in its more and more troubled invasion of Ukraine on areas it illegally annexed, whereas the dying toll from earlier missile strikes on residence buildings within the southern metropolis of Zaporizhzhia rose to 14.

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

Berit Reiss-Andersen, the committee’s chair, stated the glory went to “three excellent champions of human rights, democracy and peaceable coexistence,” although it was broadly seen as a rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his conduct of Europe’s worst armed battle since World Battle II.

Putin this week illegally claimed 4 areas of Ukraine as Russian territory, together with the Zaporizhzhia area that’s dwelling to Europe’s largest nuclear energy plant, whose reactors had been shut down final month.