Russian writer and volunteer in the Donbas war Zajar Prilepin (Ryazan, 47 years old) was injured this Saturday morning when a bomb exploded on the road where his car was on in the Nizhny Novgorod region, some 400 kilometers east of Moscow , was on the way . The driver of the vehicle has died and the writer, an author of international renown, was placed in a coma after an operation, according to regional authorities. The attack happened in the town of Pionerski, about 50 kilometers from the regional capital. The explosion ripped the car in two and left a hole in the ground. The device that destroyed his Audi was activated remotely and had an explosive force of two kilograms of TNT, according to authorities. The assassination came just a month after another explosive device killed blogger and separatist paramilitary Vladlén Tatarski in a Saint Petersburg cafe. The Russian Interior Ministry has reported the arrest of two suspects in connection with the attack.
The writer was taken to a hospital by helicopter while he was still conscious. According to Baza newspaper, the writer’s daughter was also in the car, but she got out of the vehicle just before the explosion. According to the official Russian version, the first detainee, Alexander Permiakov, is a Ukrainian citizen born in 1993. The second, another man they call Sergei, who according to the Baza channel rented an apartment – about which no details are given – and identified himself to the landlord as a native of Izium in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine. According to sources from the Russian outlet Baza, the police located him at the apartment.
The Russian Investigative Committee, a body that combines police and prosecution functions, has released a video of Permiakov’s interrogation, in which he admits he was recruited by Ukraine’s intelligence services in 2018 and entered Russia last year to crack down on the writer . According to Moscow, after remotely activating the explosives, the suspect attempted to escape through a forest, but was found and arrested.
The writer was seriously injured and had to be operated on in a hospital in Nizhny Novgorod with the help of other Moscow doctors. “The operation was successful. Zajar eventually came to his senses, but they put him in a coma to help him recover faster,” said the region’s governor, Gleb Nikitin.
Several of Prilepin’s works – whose real name is Yevgueni – have been translated into other languages and he has collaborated in numerous media outlets, some of them abroad. In Spain, one of his best-known works on the conflict in Chechnya was published by Pathologies (Sajalín Editores) in 2012. The writer was a youth member of the National Bolshevik Party founded by Eduard Limonov and Russian ultra-nationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, and between 2016 and 2018 he joined the Kremlin-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine as a paramilitary. Prilepin was appointed commander of a battalion named in his honor. Prilepin referred to this battalion in an interview he gave to the official newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2017: “It was created on my initiative, and we will strive, like knights in shining armor, to reach the cities we left [en referencia al territorio perdido por los separatistas en la guerra de Donbás de 2014 a 2015]“.
Image provided by the Russian authorities of the vehicle in which Prilepin was traveling after the explosion this Saturday. HANDOUT (AFP)
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In addition to defending ultra-nationalist theses, Prilepin has also been critical of the Kremlin in the past. Between 2007 and 2011 he was part of the Russian National Liberation Movement (NAROD), a platform that also included an unknown dissident who is now one of the Kremlin’s great enemies: Alexei Navalni.
Prilepin is currently a member of the Kremlin satellite party Just Russia – For Truth. Its leader Sergei Mironov has emphasized that Kiev has targeted the defenders of the war: “It operates by force directly in Russia, targeting the ideologues of the special military operation.” The novelist has in his latest Telegram publications – up to this one Saturday – Shared content supporting Yevgueni Prigozhin, the leader of Wagner’s mercenaries, after his threat to withdraw from the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. He also shared other warmongering content from Kremlin propaganda channels.
Moscow blames Ukraine
The Russian Foreign Ministry has blamed Ukraine, and indirectly the United States and the United Kingdom, for the attack just hours after it occurred. “Washington and NATO have fed another international terrorist cell: the Kiev regime. Bin Laden, the Islamic State and now [el presidente ucranio, Volodímir] Zelensky and his thugs,” Russian ministry spokeswoman Maria Zajárova wrote on Telegram. “This is the direct responsibility of the United States and the United Kingdom. We pray for Zajar,” he added.
The deceased was identified as Alexander Shubin, a 27-year-old separatist paramilitary from the Lugansk region of Ukraine. Nicknamed Zloi (Mal), he worked as a bodyguard for Prilepin and was on the Ukrainian Mirotvorets blacklist, which includes not only pro-Russian separatist soldiers, but also politicians, journalists and other public figures.
Since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, at least two leading figures who supported the invasion of Ukraine have been killed in separate attacks. The propagandist Tatarski, on April 2, when a statuette presented to him by an assistant of the conference he chaired exploded in a cafeteria of the owner of the Wagner mercenary company; and Dugin’s daughter, Daria Dugina, was killed when a bomb exploded in her car outside Moscow on August 21, 2022.
In Nizhny Novgorod, the security forces activated the wiretapping protocol that had already been used in the past in border regions with Ukraine following alleged acts of sabotage. “The police stop all suspicious cars, check the driver’s documents and inspect the vehicles,” said a police spokesman for the TASS news agency.
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