Images showed thick black smoke rising from a fire on the Kerch bridge that links the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014, to Russia, reported AFP.

Earlier, Dmitry Peskov, Russian president Vladimir Putin's spokesperson, told news agency RIA Novosti that a governmental commission had been set up to deal with the consequences of the “incident.”

Russian investigators have launched a probe, adding that a truck “had exploded” on the automobile part of the bridge, destroying “two arches” of the bridge and setting a train carrying fuel on fire on the railway that runs parallel to the automobile bridge.