For the last two decades, Russian leader Vladimir Putin has conducted one of the largest bridge-building operations in history, outpaced, apparently, only by the Chinese.
In May 2018, Russia opened the Kerch Straits Bridge (Crimean Bridge), upon which construction started in February 2016. It carries motor vehicle traffic and rail traffic. It is notable for a few reasons. At 18,100 meters in length, it passed Portugal’s Vasco Da Gama Bridge, at 17,185 meters in length, as Europe’s longest bridge (in miles it is 11.5 miles long). It connects Crimea across the body of water of the Kerch Straits to the eastern part of Russia, which became necessary after Crimea voted, in March 2014, to rejoin Russia, and was menaced by NATO-aligned forces. The $3.7 billion bridge was built against a background of EU- and American-imposed sanctions, including against the bridge’s principal construction contractor, Arkady Rotenberg. Despite the sanctions, the bridge was completed ahead of schedule.
The bridge could be built relatively so quickly, because bridge-building engineering and management qualities have been fostered by Putin’s bridge-building policy. Of the 32 longest bridges in Russia, 22 have been built after 2000, that is, after Putin first took office as President. The combined length of all these bridges is 129 Km (80 miles); of this total the new ones (built since 2000) stretch 107 KM (67 miles), consisting of 83% of the total length of the major bridges.
Of the 22 bridges built through Putin’s policy, some are quite lovely. One example is the Bulshoy Obukhovsky Bridge, in St. Petersburg, over the River Neva, which is 2.9 km (1.8 miles) in length, and was built in 2007 (take a look at it on the internet). Another is the President Bridge, over the Volga River, at Ulyanovsk, a 5.8 km (3.6 miles) bridge built in 2009, which is in the north of Russia.
On Nov. 9, 2019, President Putin gave approval to the government’s plan to build a bridge over the Lena River, one of Russia’s three great Siberian rivers, at the city of Yakutsk, a city of 300,000 in the frigid Russian far east, in order to develop the region.. In the winter, drivers have to drive over the frozen River Lena. On Dec. 17, 2020, Russia’s government-owned Sberbank issued a first phase $344 million line of credit for construction of the bridge (a plan to build the bridge had been advanced earlier, but was held in abeyance to build the strategically important Kerch Bridge).
How many new bridges have been built, over the last two decades, in the United States or in Western European nations? Yet, some British critics claim that Putin has no knowledge of how to build infrastructure.
