At the start of this year, on the Orthodox Christmas Eve, Russian engineers working in occupied Ukraine received an unwanted present.

Four months earlier, in September, they had begun building a railway bridge over the Kalmius river, about 35 miles north of the port city of Mariupol. On January 6 Kyiv’s forces bombarded and destroyed it.

The attack, near a little village called Hranitne, received little attention. But in staging it, the Ukrainians were trying to stop a new front that President Putin has opened in his war against their country.

Over the past year Russia has embarked on a huge railway building programme that aims to link Crimea through the territories it has seized from Ukraine since it invaded in February 2022 with Donetsk,

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