Evgeny Poddubny, a war correspondent for the state RT outlet, said that nobody in the Ukrainian leadership seemed to fear Russia anymore.
“The enemy has stopped being afraid, and this circumstance needs to be corrected promptly,” he wrote in RT’s Telegram channel. “Commanders of formations, heads of intelligence agencies, politicians of the Kyiv criminal regime sleep peacefully, wake up without a headache and in a good mood, without a sense of inevitability of punishment for crimes committed.”
Aleksandr Kots, a war correspondent for the Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, wrote on Telegram that the bridge attack boded ill for Moscow’s already troubled efforts to hold onto territory in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine, and most likely foreshadowed a future attack on Crimea itself.
He described the “consistency” that Ukraine was showing in the war as “enviable” and called for Russia to “hammer Ukraine into the 18th century, without meaningless reflection on how this will affect the civilian population.”
The potential for reprisal attacks darkened the celebratory atmosphere in Ukraine in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Kerch Strait Bridge. In Kyiv on Sunday, those going about their errands reflected on the unease they now felt about what might happen next.
“Everyone is anxious, I think,” said Volodymyr Stelmakh, 50.
The attack, he said, has only raised the alarm for Ukrainians, particularly those in Russian-occupied areas, that something worse could come.
“I don’t think it will happen right away,” said Veacheslav Tuceac, 32, who was born in Moldova and moved to Ukraine a few years ago with his wife. But the bridge attack, he fears, might be “the start of a chain of events.”
