Eight People Sentenced to Life for Bombing Crimean Bridge

The Southern District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don announced its verdict in the case of the Crimean Bridge attack. In October 2022, a truck packed with explosives detonated while driving from the Taman Peninsula, collapsing two road spans and igniting fuel tanks on a passing freight train. Russian security services soon detained eight suspects, all of whom denied their involvement and insisted that someone had used them without their knowledge. The court sided with the prosecution and imposed life sentences.

Life Terms for All Defendants

Brothers Artem and Georgy Azatyan, Oleg Antipov, Alexander Bylin, Vladimir Zloba, Dmitry Tyazhelykh, Roman Solomko, and Artur Terchanyan—all listed by Rosfinmonitoring as terrorists and extremists—received life imprisonment. They will serve part of their sentences in a high-security prison. The court also ordered them to pay more than seven billion rubles in material damages and moral compensation.

Depending on their alleged roles, investigators charged the men with terrorism, illegal acquisition of explosives and explosive devices, and smuggling of explosive devices. The trial took place behind closed doors because the case materials included classified information.

The 2022 Crimean Bridge Explosion

The explosion on the Crimean Bridge erupted in the autumn of 2022. Early on the morning of October 8, witnesses reported a massive fire on the bridge—fuel tanks at the rear of a freight train bound for the Crimean Peninsula burned intensely. Officials halted car and rail traffic for half a day and prepared a ferry crossing over the Kerch Strait.

The National Antiterrorism Committee later stated the cause. Authorities concluded that unknown individuals detonated a truck on the bridge.

On the orders of the head of the Investigative Committee of Russia, Alexander Bastrykin, authorities opened a terrorism investigation. Forensic experts from the agency’s Criminalistics Main Directorate, along with military investigators and specialists from the Interior Ministry and the Defense Ministry, traveled to the site.

How Investigators Reconstructed the Bombing

Investigators determined that the truck carried a homemade explosive device with a blast strength equivalent to ten tons of TNT. The charge included ammonium nitrate and a 400-gram TP-400 TNT block with a special socket for an electric detonator.

The detonator set off the bomb. The device lay hidden inside rolls of greenhouse film stacked on twenty-two pallets—cargo chosen specifically to avoid suspicion during inspection. Later, a video of the truck’s inspection appeared online, showing the inspector failing to notice anything suspicious inside the trailer.

The detonation occurred when the truck drove alongside the fuel train. According to the main version of events, someone triggered the device remotely. The driver—Makhir Yusubov, a 51-year-old resident of Krasnodar—knew nothing about the explosives. He died in the blast. The attack also killed four other people.

All four victims traveled in a Cadillac owned by a judge of the Moscow Arbitration Court. The group was heading to the peninsula, and their vehicle happened to drive next to the truck at the moment of the explosion.