Defendants in court over the 2022 terrorist attack on the Crimean Bridge, Rostov-on-Don, Russia, 12 February 2025. Photo: Vasily Deryugin / Kommersant / Sipa USA / Vida Press
A military court in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don has sentenced eight men it found guilty of causing an explosion on the Crimean Bridge in 2022 to life imprisonment, Russian news agency TASS reported on Thursday.
Artyom and Georgy Azatyan, Oleg Antipov, Alexander Bylin, Volodymyr Zlob, Roman Solomko, Artur Terchanyan and Dmitry Tyazhelykh were all found guilty of illegally transporting explosives and carrying out a terrorist attack on the bridge on 8 October 2022. Solomko, a dual citizen of Ukraine and Moldova, and Terchanyan, an Armenian citizen, were also convicted of smuggling explosive devices. None of the men pleaded guilty.
A truck carrying explosives was detonated remotely as it drove across the Crimean Bridge, which connects the annexed Crimean Peninsula with the Russian mainland, on 8 October 2022. Five people were killed, including the driver of the truck, while several railway containers caught fire and a 250-metre section of the road bridge collapsed.
Vasyl Malyuk, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), admitted in July 2023 that the Ukrainian intelligence services had been responsible for the explosion. He said the SBU had used unsuspecting “Russian smugglers” and that 22 people had been detained in Russia in relation to the operation. The indictment named Malyuk as the main perpetrator of the attack.
The eight men in the dock were logistics employees, drivers, and businessmen from Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia. All the defendants’ jobs involved either transporting freight on the route the truck that exploded on the bridge took that day.
Human rights activists have voiced fears that the accused were randomly arrested people with no connection to the attack, with the only evidence for their guilt being memes on their phones or their subscriptions to the “wrong” Telegram channels.
