Security and defence analyst Professor Michael Clarke has been speaking to Sky News this morning with one of his regular updates.

Commenting on the Kerch bridge attack, he says Ukraine was likely behind it, adding: “I’d be astonished if it was anybody else”.

“It wasn’t an accident – you don’t lose a bridge like that in an accident.

“If it was some sort of accidental truck explosion, then the bridge was extremely badly designed and very very badly built, because bridges are designed to take that sort of thing.”

Why hasn’t Ukraine claimed responsibility?

One reason could be because such an attack would have required missiles “they’re not supposed to have”, he says, adding: “I think it (also) suits them to keep everybody guessing, to be honest.”

“We all know it was them and they won’t want to reveal how they did it, because they might want to do something similar again.”

Was the attack on Zaporizhzhia a Russian response to what happened on the bridge?

“I’m sure.

“In a way, the Russians are doing the worst they can – at the moment all they can do is attack civilian areas with not very accurate missiles.

“When people worry about the Russian response – they’re already doing their worst.

“If they want to respond, then they’ve got to escalate the war in a different direction, which I think Putin is struggling with at the moment.

“But on the battlefield it won’t make any difference to the Ukrainians.

“They’re moving forward on all fronts at the moment, and they’re finding ways of frustrating the Russian logistics and making the Russians look foolish in the eyes of their own people.”

What about Russia’s nuclear threats?

“Everyone is talking about nuclear weapons and they want us to talk about nuclear weapons, but I think it’s still a very remote prospect, to be honest.

“But there are other ways it might be escalated.

“The war has already escalated into the Baltic Sea with the sabotage of the (Nord Stream) pipelines.

“It may escalate geographically towards Moldova, towards the western Balkans.

“It has escalated in terms of rhetoric – Putin says it’s not really about Ukraine, it’s not even about NATO enlargement.

“This is about the war of the west on Russia, trying to destroy Russia and Russian civilisation.

“That’s absurd but that’s where we are now that the rhetoric is going up and up and up, because he’s trying to convince the Russian people that they’re somehow under attack from the ‘fascists in the West’.

“So he’s casting around for ways of grabbing the agenda back, because on the ground he’s losing on all fronts at the moment.”