This 12-mile-bridge in Crimea is a lifeline for Russia's occupation, but attacks and damages are making it a headache for Moscow

• The Kerch Bridge connecting Russia and Crimea was damaged by explosions on Monday morning. 
• The bridge was previously hit in October by an bomb-laden truck and didn't reopen until February.
• The attacks harm Russia's economic, symbolic, and military ties to Crimea, experts told Insider.

The 12-mile-bridge connecting Russia and Crimea is a lifeline for Moscow's economic and cultural interests in the occupied peninsula — but recent attacks have damaged it severely, causing lasting problems for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Crimean occupation officials. 

On Monday, an explosion rocked the roadbed of the Kerch Strait Bridge, killing two adults and suspending traffic. The Kremlin called the event "a terror attack" completed by Ukraine's unmanned drones, while Putin and other Russian officials urged tougher security and threatened "targeted and quite inhumane" consequences.

"The impact on transportation and logistical supply to Crimea are immediately becoming evident," said Karolina Hird, a Russian analyst and Evans Hanson fellow at the Institute for the Study of War think tank. "But the biggest thing we're tracking right now is the suspension of movement to and from occupied Crimea via the bridge, and that will obviously have implications on the Russian military presence in occupied Ukraine."

An attack on the Kerch Bridge is far from "an extraordinary event," as Sergey Aksyonov, the Russian-installed governor of Crimea, said, according to The Kyiv Post.

The bridge is the physical link between Russia and the Crimea peninsula, and attacks on it bring the war home to Russians and undermine Putin's successful seizure of this territory from Ukraine.

Last October, an bomb-laden truck exploded on the westbound span of the bridge and eastbound span of a rail bridge, killing three. The damage was so severe, Kerch Bridge was closed for normal vehicle traffic until February 2023 and railway traffic until May 2023. 

While Ukraine didn't take responsibility for October's attack, a Ukrainian Security Service source did tell CNN the group and Kyiv's naval forces were behind July's attack.

Kyiv has previously threatened the bridge, which served as a route for Russia to transport equipment before its February 2022 invasion, and has contributed to supply lines through Crimea and operational support along the southern front. 

While much of Russia's military traffic has "shifted to other land bridges father to the north" after October's attack, according to Samuel Bendett, a research analyst with the Center for Naval Analyses' International Affairs Group, the bridge still "demonstrates uninterrupted access" between Russia and Crimea. 

The most recent attack also hinders summer tourism to Crimea, which ISW's Hird said has a been a priority for Russia. 

"There's been a huge push on the part of Russian authorities to really sustain and even increase tourism in occupied Crimea for economic reasons, and for an integration of occupied Crimea into the larger Russian system." 

Beach goers in an active war zone? One of the many examples of Putin and the Kremlin avoiding bringing the war home to their own citizens. "They don't want to fully mobilize society for war," Hird said.

Putin himself has signaled the Russian Navy's involvement in bringing more tourists in, she added, calling it a "cognitive dissonance" as Crimea continues to be a legitimate target area for Ukraine, who's targeted the area and the Black Sea Fleet in the past few months. The result has been constant stress on Crimean citizens. 

Finished in 2018, the Kerch Bridge was seen as a landmark achievement by Russia, a relatively short and permanent way to access Crimea. And while it primarily serves to connect the two, it's also symbolizes Russia's influence and control over the peninsula, which it illegally annexed in 2014, and Ukraine has identified as the most important territory to reclaim. 

But defending the Kerch Bridge is a logistical nightmare for Russia, prompting a hoard of questions. "How do you defend a long bridge like that? Where do you place your defenses? Do you fly patrols around it? Do you install sensors on it all the time? Do you have maritime patrols all the time?" Bendett said. "It's difficult to properly and completely defend an asset as large as a bridge like that." 

And the attack has severe military repercussions, especially as Ukraine's counteroffensive pushes against deeply rooted Russian trenches, mine fields, and defensive lines. 

"Right now, we've seen really high rates of insubordination and problems of morale and discipline in elements of Russian forces that are deployed" in the south, Hird said, adding that the bridge made evacuation "a lot easier" and "now that this capability is inhibited, that is bound to be have some sort of psychological morale impact on Russian forces."

"We might start to see some panic induced in a struggling force that's already on the low end of morale," she added.