Imagine opening your social media feed and seeing two haunting images side by side. On the left, a bridge in Kyiv still smoldering after a Russian missile strike. On the right, the Crimean Bridge damaged after a Ukrainian attack. The caption is always the same: “Why is one tragedy condemned and the other celebrated?” It feels like a fair question, especially to someone scrolling quickly, exhausted by the noise of war. But the Center for Countering Disinformation at Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council has identified this as exactly the kind of manipulation that is now being recorded in both international and Ukrainian information spaces. Russian propaganda is pushing a narrative of “double standards,” trying to make it seem as though Ukraine and the West approve of attacks on “Russian civilian infrastructure” while hypocritically condemning Russia for doing the same. At first glance, this comparison can feel powerful and even logical. But the CCD warns that it is a classic manipulation, one that deliberately distorts the norms of international humanitarian law and erases the military-operational context that separates a legitimate act of war from a war crime. It is a clever trick, but it only works if you ignore what each bridge actually is, what it does, and who suffers when it is destroyed. The goal is not to inform, but to blur moral lines until no one can tell the difference between defense and terror.
Let us start with the Crimean Bridge, because Russia works very hard to cast it as a beloved civilian symbol, a picturesque connection between the mainland and the peninsula. But under international law, sentiment does not decide the status of a target. The Crimean Bridge is not just a structure. It was illegally constructed on Ukrainian territory that Russia occupied and tried to annex. More importantly, it has become a critical transport artery for the Russian military, funneling weapons, ammunition, fuel, and occupation troops from Russia to the front lines in southern Ukraine. Under Article 52 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, an object can be considered a legitimate military objective if it makes an effective contribution to military action and if its neutralization offers a definite military advantage. The Crimean Bridge qualifies on both counts. It is not merely a road; it is a logistics pipeline feeding an invading army. Disabling such a target falls squarely within Ukraine’s right to self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. This is not a radical or fringe interpretation of the law. It is the basic, unglamorous logic of warfare: when your enemy is supplying its soldiers through a particular point, that point becomes part of the battlefield. Of course, the bridge also carries civilians, and no compassionate person wants civilian life to be harmed. But international humanitarian law does not require a target to have zero civilian use in order to be struck. It requires a careful weighing of military advantage against potential harm to civilians. In the case of the Kerch bridge, the military advantage is enormous. Every piece of ammunition, every armored vehicle, every soldier that crosses that bridge is a threat to Ukrainian lives. Neutralizing that flow is not an act of spite or symbolic revenge; it is an act of survival. The CCD makes this point plainly: disabling the enemy’s military logistics routes as part of self-defense is an entirely legitimate military tactic. The only real question is whether Ukraine has the means and timing to do it effectively, not whether it has the right to do so at all.
Now look at the other side of the comparison: the bridges of Kyiv. These are not military arteries. They are the veins of a living, breathing city. Kyiv sits hundreds of kilometers from the line of contact, far from the active fighting. Its bridges are not carrying tanks toward the front; they are carrying parents taking children to school, doctors rushing to hospitals, firefighters answering emergency calls, and workers trying to keep a city of millions functioning. Every day, ordinary people depend on these crossings for their most basic needs. When Russian missiles strike them, there is no direct impact on the battlefield. The front line does not shift because of a destroyed bridge in the capital. What does shift is the sense of safety. What grows is fear. The strikes are designed to intimidate the civilian population, to create chaos, to make life in Kyiv unbearable, and to provoke a humanitarian collapse. This is the very definition of terror. Even in wartime, the legal principle of proportionality demands that attacks must not cause excessive harm to civilians and civilian objects in relation to the anticipated military advantage. But Russia’s strikes on Kyiv’s bridges are not collateral damage. The civilian population is not an unfortunate side effect; it is the intended target. The CCD emphasizes that these attacks have no direct bearing on the situation on the battlefield, which is precisely why they are so horrifying. They are not acts of war in any meaningful strategic sense. They are acts of psychological punishment, aimed at breaking the morale of a nation that refuses to surrender. To treat such attacks as the moral equivalent of striking a military supply route is to say that a surgeon removing a bullet is the same as a murderer firing one. It is a monstrous comparison, and it deserves to be recognized as such.
Russia’s outrage over the Crimean Bridge is also breathtakingly selective. As the CCD notes, the Russian army has a long history of destroying bridge crossings in combat zones—in places like Sievierodonetsk, Kupiansk, and the Donetsk region—specifically to slow down and disrupt the actions of the Ukrainian Defense Forces. Moscow has never called those attacks “terrorism.” It has never complained about “attacks on civilian infrastructure.” Russian commanders knew perfectly well that bridges in a war zone are military objectives, and they blew them up without hesitation. The Kremlin only discovers its deep love for bridges when the bridge in question is its own, and even then only because it wants to use that outrage to justify its own crimes. This is not a principled position; it is a cynical performance. There is something deeply absurd about watching Russian officials shed tears over the Kerch bridge while the ruins of Ukrainian cities still smoke and while Russian missiles continue to destroy schools, hospitals, power plants, and homes. They do not weep for the bridges that have been demolished in Ukrainian cities. They weep only for the bridge that carries the machinery of invasion. The distinction is clear. One side is fighting to defend its existence against a brutal aggressor. The other side is waging a war of conquest. When a nation is invaded, it is not only allowed but morally obligated to disrupt the enemy’s supply lines. When an invader deliberately targets civilian infrastructure in a rear city, it is committing a war crime. No amount of clever editing, no viral side-by-side graphic, can make those two realities the same. The CCD concludes that the Kremlin’s attempt to portray itself as a “victim” over the Kerch bridge is manipulation intended to justify its own war crimes. It is a mask, not a mourning veil.
What makes this manipulation even more sickening is that Ukraine’s actual approach to the Crimean Bridge is far more nuanced and humane than propaganda suggests. In July, Commander Robert “Madyar” Brovdi of the Unmanned Systems Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said something that might surprise many people: Ukraine was not targeting the Crimean Bridge at that moment, deliberately allowing civilians and collaborators to leave the peninsula. Think about what that means. A country defending itself against a brutal invasion, facing daily missile attacks on its own cities, still chose to hold back from striking a high-value target in order to give ordinary people a chance to escape. That is not the behavior of a nation that enjoys destroying bridges for the sake of destruction. It is the behavior of a military trying to calibrate its operations, to degrade Russian military logistics while reducing the risk to civilian life. And when Ukrainian forces did strike a railway bridge over the North Crimean Canal, the target was a rail line used for military supplies, not the main civilian road bridge. The message is subtle but powerful: Ukraine is fighting a war, not a campaign of terror. It would rather delay a strike than turn civilians into pawns for Russian propaganda. This is not to say that every Ukrainian operation is flawless or that war is ever clean. Mistakes happen, and war is always tragic. But the overall pattern is unmistakable. Ukraine consistently targets military infrastructure: ammunition depots, airfields, radar systems, naval vessels, and supply railways. Russia, by contrast, targets residential blocks, energy grids, and civilian bridges in an attempt to break the spirit of a population. The difference in intent is written in the rubble. Russian propaganda wants you to believe that both sides are equally cynical, that this is just a grudge match between two angry nations. But the evidence paints a different picture. One side is systematically trying to destroy the will of a civilian population. The other is trying to cut the logistics that sustain an invasion. These are not two sides of the same coin. They belong to different moral universes.
In the end, the CCD’s warning is a call for moral clarity. As the information space fills with increasingly sophisticated manipulations, the greatest danger is not simply that people will believe a lie. It is that they will stop believing that truth matters. When every attack is called “war,” when every victim is called “collateral damage,” when every military action and every crime are flattened into the same gray fog of “both sides,” the only winner is the aggressor. Russia wants the world to forget that there is a legal and ethical difference between defending your homeland and invading someone else’s. It wants to pretend that a bridge used to supply tanks is the same as a bridge used by ambulances. It wants to turn the victim and the perpetrator into indistinguishable brawlers so that no one can be held accountable. The CCD’s conclusion is simple but necessary: we must distinguish between legitimate actions to neutralize the occupiers’ logistics and deliberate terror against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. The first is a right of any nation under attack. The second is a war crime. For ordinary readers, this means becoming aware of the emotional shortcuts propaganda uses. The side-by-side images, the self-righteous captions, the invitation to feel clever by noticing “double standards”—these are techniques designed to bypass critical thinking. The next time someone compares Russian strikes on Kyiv with Ukrainian strikes on Russian military targets, ask yourself what each bridge is actually doing, who stands on it, and what the attack is meant to achieve. The answers matter. They are the difference between justice and terrorism. Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation is doing its part by documenting these manipulations and explaining the law, but the rest of us also have a role to play. We can choose not to share the fog. We can choose to speak plainly about what is happening. And we can choose to stand with the only side in this war that is fighting not only for territory, but for a world where words like “proportionality” and “civilian protection” still have meaning. That is not a naive hope. It is the very foundation of every effort to restrain the madness of war. And it is exactly what the Kremlin is trying to destroy.