MOSCOW, July 31. /ITAR-TASS/. Russia should start building a bridge across the Kerch Strait already in 2014, a deputy prime minister said on Thursday.

“We have agreed to launch the construction of a bridge across the Kerch Strait this year,” Dmitry Kozak said at a government meeting on Crimea’s development.

Minister of Crimean Affairs Oleg Savelyev said that the government will allocate 247 billion rubles ($6.9 billion) on the bridge construction project. The Kerch bridge will connect Crimea with Russia’s southern Krasnodar territory, as the only ways to travel directly to the peninsula are by plane and by ferry.

Rosavtodor, the state-run road builder that is managing the project, has proposed constructing two road-rail bridges across Tuzla, a sandy island located in the middle of the Kerch Strait. The first bridge connecting the Taman Peninsula and Tuzla will be 6.1 kilometers long, while the second one will stretch for 1.4 kilometers from Tuzla to the Crimean Peninsula.

Andrei Sokolov, a deputy minister for Crimean affairs, said earlier that in the future Russia could build another bridge or a tunnel if relations with Ukraine do not improve.