By Andrew Osborn
ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia (Reuters) -A Russian military court on Thursday sentenced eight men to life in prison over their purported role in a deadly Ukrainian truck bomb attack on the bridge which links southern Russia to Crimea in a ruling celebrated by war bloggers.
Ukraine’s SBU domestic intelligence agency claimed responsibility for the attack, which in October 2022 ripped through part of the 19-km (11.8-mile) bridge, killing five people and damaging what was a key supply route for Russian forces fighting in Ukraine.
Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and the bridge was a flagship project for President Vladimir Putin, who opened it for road traffic by driving a truck across in 2018.
The driver of the truck carrying the explosives was killed in the attack, as were four civilians in a passenger car nearby, and a section of the bridge partially collapsed.
The eight men convicted on terrorism charges were accused of being part of an organised criminal group which helped Ukraine carry out the bombing.
Vasyl Malyuk, the head of Ukraine’s SBU, said in 2023 that the explosives had been concealed in metal cylinders hidden inside large rolls of plastic film.
The SBU had used others in the plot but had kept them in the dark about what was really going on, he said.
DEFENDANTS PROTESTED THEIR INNOCENCE
All eight defendants protested their innocence at the closed-door trial and said they had not known about the Ukrainian plot.
Those accused of smuggling the explosives said they had not known what they were transporting. State prosecutors argued that they must have known.
Standing inside a glass courtroom cage with the others accused, Oleg Antipov, head of a logistics company which took the order to deliver the cargo from southern Russia to Crimea, said that he and the others had undergone lie detector tests, had cooperated with the investigation, and that nobody had testified against them.
“We are innocent!,” he told the courtroom.
Alexei Dubrovin, a lawyer for one of the defendants, said he would appeal the ruling and that the court had not allowed him to do what was necessary to prove his client’s innocence.
Russian war bloggers said justice had been done.
“The eight accomplices who were used by the SBU like single-use crockery will rot in the Arctic Owl prison or the Black Dolphin prison for the rest of their lives,” said Alexander Kots, war correspondent for the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.
State prosecutors said the explosives were smuggled into Russia by road from Ukraine through Bulgaria, Armenia and Georgia.
(Reporting by ReutersWriting by Andrew Osborn in Moscow, Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Ed Osmond)
