- Third bomb attack inside Russia on prominent pro-war advocates
- The Foreign Ministry spokeswoman blames Kiev and the West
- The Kremlin says it has not yet commented on the investigation
May 6 (Portal) – A prominent Russian nationalist writer, Zakhar Prilepin, was wounded in a car bomb attack on Saturday that killed his driver, an attack Russia immediately blamed on Ukraine and the West.
The state investigative committee said the writer’s Audi Q7 was blown up in a village in the Nizny Novgorod region, some 400 km (250 miles) east of Moscow, in what it treated as an act of terrorism. He was taken to the hospital, it said.
An Interior Ministry spokeswoman said a suspect had been arrested.
It was the third bombing of a top pro-pro-war figure inside Russia since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russia has blamed Ukraine for the deaths of the previous two targets, which Kyiv denies. There was no immediate news from Ukraine about the recent incident.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram: “The fact has come true: Washington and NATO have fed another international terrorist cell – the Kiev regime.”
She said it was the “direct responsibility of the US and UK” but provided no evidence to support the allegation.
“We pray for Zakhar,” she said.
The state news agency TASS quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as refusing to comment due to lack of information from investigators.
The agency said former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sent a telegram to Prilepin, describing the incident as a “heinous attack by Nazi extremists.”
Prilepin is a novelist known as an outspoken supporter of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, where Moscow’s invasion is in its 15th month. He is a prolific exponent of nationalist views with more than 300,000 followers on Telegram and his own website and YouTube channel.
He fought for Russian proxy forces in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region before Moscow’s large-scale invasion last year, where he led a military unit where he boasted in a 2019 YouTube interview that his unit had “killed people in large numbers.”
“These people are dead, they’re buried and … there are a lot of them,” he said. “Not a single unit among the Donetsk battalions had such results. It was an outrageous mess what we did there… Not a single field commander had such results as I did.”
Saturday’s incident followed the killing of military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky at a St Petersburg cafe last month. Last August, Darya Dugina, the daughter of a nationalist ideologue, was killed in a car bomb attack near Moscow.
Reporting by Portal Editor by Peter Graff
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Mark Trevelian