Experts warn about Crimean bridge’s negative impact on environment of Sea of Azov

Experts from the public organization Ecodia believe that the bridge's construction across the Kerch Strait has endangered the Crimean ecosystems and even the entire Sea of ​​Azov.

According to environmentalists, the very construction and existence of the bridge across the Kerch Strait carry the following risks:

• it can destroy the ecological balance in the Sea of ​​Azov
• harm the seasonal migration of fish and cetaceans
• disrupt hydrological processes.

In the end, it may even turn the Sea of ​​Azov into an estuary or a bay, according to Ecodia.

"This project has already destroyed nature on the island of Tuzla in the Kerch Strait. And the construction of the highway from Kerch to Sevastopol and the extraction of materials for this destroyed numerous historic and natural areas, including the unique Bakal spit," the organization's post says.

Reference

The Crimean Bridge, also called Kerch Bridge, is an illegally constructed pair of four-lane road bridges and a double-track railway through the Kerch Strait between the Taman Peninsula of Krasnodar Krai in russia and the russian-occupied Kerch Peninsula of Crimea, Ukraine.

Following russia's invasion and annexation of Crimea in March 2014, russia declared it would build the Kerch Strait bridge to connect the russian mainland with the annexed Ukrainian peninsula. The project was symbolic, strategic, and instrumental to russian plans to integrate the newly annexed territory into russia.

The construction of the Kerch Bridge took place without Ukraine's consent. The Ukrainian government has actively condemned the russian construction of the bridge as illegal. 

Since December 2018, the United Nations General Assembly has repeatedly condemned the construction and opening of the bridge as "facilitating the further militarization of Crimea" and "restricting the size of ships that can reach the Ukrainian ports on the Azov coast."

On October 10, fuel tanks caught fire on the railroad, and a section of the road was destroyed at the Crimean Bridge, which connects russia to the temporarily occupied Ukrainian Crimea. The Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine wrote:

"Morning on the Crimean Bridge. Fuel tanks have caught fire. A section of the road has been destroyed! Everything will be Ukraine!" the Air Force wrote.

Earlier, the russian media, referring to the "authorities" of temporarily occupied Crimea, reported that traffic across the Crimean Bridge was suspended after a fuel tank caught fire.

As a result of an explosion, two highway spans collapsed, and the railway section was damaged.