One of the biggest mysteries of the beginning of the war, which remains unresolved due to military law restrictions, is the question of blowing up bridges in Mykolaiv, Kyiv, and the Kyiv region.
The Antonivskyi Bridge in Kherson is not included in this list. As it turned out, despite the obvious threat of an attack from Russia, this strategic bridge was not mined before the war. And during the events of February 24-26, the military simply did not dare or did not manage to blow it up, since Ukrainian troops were still on the left bank and had to retreat to Kherson through this bridge.
For a better understanding of the situation, it might be worth quoting an interview with Mykhailo Podolyak, advisor to the head of the President’s Office, given to the newspaper “Fakty” in September 2022.
“That morning of February 24, we were not psychologically ready to blow up bridges, for example… The first few hours we thought: we invested money in comfort for people, how now to destroy all this?.. We thought that on the other side there are also people, that they would treat houses, bridges, and other infrastructure carefully,” recalls Yermak’s advisor.
As we already know, two days before the final occupation of Kherson, Ukrainian troops retreated to the neighboring Mykolaiv. This regional center was also not ready for defense, but fortunately, General Dmytro Marchenko, who arrived in Mykolaiv on February 25, managed to quickly organize the city’s defense and save it from occupation. And here I draw your attention again. An episode from an interview with Marchenko, which he gave to the local site “Nikvesti” in May 2022, is interesting.
In a conversation with a journalist, the general recalls that during the defense of Mykolaiv, when the fate of the 500-thousand city hung by a thread, an unnamed person from Kyiv repeatedly called by phone and demanded to blow up the Varvarivskyi Bridge. An astonishing demand, considering that this bridge, unlike the Antonivskyi in Kherson, has a completely different geographical significance for defense. Kherson is located on the western (right) bank of the Dnieper. The Antonivskyi Bridge connected Kherson with the eastern (left) bank, to which the Russians from Crimea were approaching. Therefore, blowing it up could at least delay the enemy.
The Varvarivskyi Bridge in Mykolaiv, on the contrary, connects the eastern (left) bank of the Southern Bug, where the city is located, with the safe western (right) bank, from which the road to Odesa runs. That is, if Marchenko had blown up the Varvarivskyi Bridge as ordered from Kyiv, then Mykolaiv would have been completely encircled, and the Ukrainian Armed Forces would have lost communication with the Odesa group.
“They took us by the Mariupol plan − to encircle, to push out all (Ukrainian) troops to the center of the city, to some object, let’s say, the 61 Communards Plant, cut off electricity, water and wait until we start to go mad, until we run out of ammunition, food, water,” said Dmytro Marchenko.
The next episode of the war, raising many questions, is related to blowing up bridges in Kyiv. According to BBC sources, on February 26, an unnamed person called the then head of the Security Service of Ukraine, Ivan Bakanov, demanding that he order a special unit of the SBU to blow up the bridges across the Dnieper. Bakanov decided to pass this task to the military and called Zaluzhny so that his subordinates could perform the explosion, but the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces refused.
“Blow up the bridges? No way! That would be a betrayal of those left on the left bank of the Dnieper — both military and civilians,” Zaluzhny said.
So who could be Bakanov’s interlocutor, who ordered the head of the Security Service of Ukraine to blow up the bridges in the capital? There are only two options: Zelensky or Yermak. Considering the configuration of Ukrainian power, other persons are excluded.
And why such panic? As of February 26, the Russians were indeed close to Kyiv. But they did not capture either Brovary or the residential areas on the left bank of Kyiv. Why would one of these two: Zelensky or Yermak, panic so much that they were ready to preemptively, without a fight, hand over more than a million residents of the left bank to the enemy? It is quite possible that it was not panic at all, but the execution of some plan. But this plan was definitely not in the interests of Ukraine.
And finally, the third episode concerns the situation with the blowing up of the bridge across the Irpin River in the Kyiv region. As claimed by a former intelligence officer of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Colonel of the Armed Forces Roman Chervinsky, the bridge across the Irpin River, which would have stopped the rapid advance of the Russians into Kyiv, was blown up on February 25 contrary to the order of the President’s Office.
“A serviceman came to our unit. He was the deputy commander of the 72nd brigade. He says, when they managed to reach Irpin overnight, set up some positions to stop the Russians, but he realized that they would not be able to. The forces are not equal. He has one brigade, and there are tens of thousands of people and equipment coming from the other side. And he says, logically I needed to blow up the bridges across Irpin. He says, when I reported this situation to the brigade commander, he said: “The President’s Office sent a command − do not blow up the bridges without their sanction.” This is the second day of the war. He says, I blew it up on my own discretion,” Chervinsky said in an interview with the site “Censor.net”.
So, two calls and one order. If the Varvarivskyi Bridge had been blown up, then Mykolaiv and its defenders would have faced the fate of Mariupol. If the bridges across the Dnieper in Kyiv had been blown up, then the Russians would have occupied almost half of the capital, where more than 1 million people live, without a fight. If the military had followed the President’s Office’s order not to blow up the bridge across the Irpin River, then Russian troops could suddenly appear on the northern and eastern outskirts of Kyiv.