The idea of building a bridge across the Kerch Strait was not new. Adolf Hitler, for one, had similar plans. He justified the occupation of Crimea by some far-fetched "historical" factors and considered the peninsula to be the home of the Germanic tribe of the Goths. Therefore, he personally ordered the construction of a transcontinental railway line from Munich through Crimea and on to India. German troops partially succeeded in implementing the temporary bridge project. The Germans built a rope way across the Kerch Strait in 1943 to help their troops get a foothold in the Kuban.

Back then, military defeats prevented the invaders from completing the extensive project, but the Soviet engineers did use the construction materials brought over by the Germans. In 1944, a temporary railway bridge was erected between the stations Krym and Kavkaz. However, the structure only held until the winter of 1945 when pillars of the structure collapsed under the pressure of drifting ice. The Soviet government abandoned the plans of restoring the bridge altogether in the 1970s, in no small measure due to the prohibitive cost of the project.

The idea of overland link across the strait re-emerged in the early 1990s when both of its shores belonged to different states: Ukraine and Russia. In the 2000s, the project envisaged the use of the island of Tuzla, which later would become the subject of an interstate conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine.

In the midst of the Revolution of Dignity, Viktor Yanukovych would consider such projects a kind of a life vest that might help him keep the power. On 12/17/2013, during his visit to Moscow, he entered into a treaty on joint actions to organize the construction of a transport link across the Kerch Strait, which was signed in a package, along with other political and economic treaties. This agreement was terminated by a resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine. However, the invader would soon implement the bridge project unilaterally.

Vladimir Putin personally took part in the illegal opening of the automobile and railway branches of the Crimean Bridge. The show was staged in the best traditions of the Soviet era. The automobile component of the bridge was commissioned on 05/15/2018. As part of the scenario, the Russian president drove a KamAZ truck at the head of a column of trucks and construction machinery that allegedly took part in the construction of the facility (about 35 vehicles in total).

On 12/23/2019, Vladimir Putin launched railway traffic on the bridge across the Kerch Strait. In the cabin of a rail bus, he went from the temporarily occupied Kerch to the station Taman on the Russian side of the strait. En route, the Russian president talked with the builders of the bridge. These Russian construction projects served to fuel the Kremlin dictator's personality cult. Construction has been glorified in every possible way in Russian songs, films, TV shows, etc.

From the point of view of transportation, infrastructural importance and logistics, the illegally erected bridge is used by the aggressor state as one of the means to promote forced integration of the temporarily occupied territory into its structure.

The Crimean Bridge is systematically used in strengthening of the occupational combined force in Crimea and the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The occupying state conducts diverse and frequent military exercises in the region, regularly redeploying additional forces across the bridge from Russia to the temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol. The bridge also improved the capabilities of the so-called "Syrian Express" of the Russian Federation.

Ostensibly for the protection and safety of the bridge, the occupying state imposes restrictions on free navigation. The Russian Federation regularly practices permanent or temporary closures of certain sea areas for navigation in the waters of the Kerch Strait and the Sea of Azov, particularly in the areas where the bridge is located. The Coast Guard of the Russian Federation is harassing the merchant maritime traffic with frequent illegal stops and searches of the vessels traveling to/from the Sea of Azov through the Kerch Strait. This causes significant economic damages to the ship-owners and to Ukrainian Azov Sea ports in Berdyansk and Mariupol.

The Russian Federation unilaterally began to apply its national laws and regulations to the waters of the Kerch Strait and the Sea of Azov. Thus, the aggressor state got a pretext to treat any action taken by Ukraine to protect its state sovereignty at sea as an act of provocation and subsequently qualify it as a casus belli. A striking example of this is the incident that happened in the Kerch Strait on 11/25/2018.

De facto, the Sea of Azov was turned into an internal lake of Russia while the occupying state uses the Kerch Strait and the Kerch Bridge as a tool to exert military, political and economic pressure on Ukraine. The threat of the creeping occupation of the entire Black Sea region is still there. The Russian Federation may attempt to establish control over the maritime transit routes near the illegally seized oil and gas platforms on the Black Sea shelf of Ukraine, or even launch an armed assault on the Snake Island.