Pro-Kremlin writer Zakhar Prilepin injured in car explosion, says Russia | Russia

A prominent Russian nationalist writer has been wounded in a car bombing that killed his driver, an attack that Russia immediately blamed on Ukraine and the west.

Zakhar Prilepin’s Audi Q7 was blown up in a village in the Nizny Novgorod region, about 250 miles (400km) east of Moscow, said the state investigative committee, which is treating the incident as an act of terrorism. It said Prilepin had been taken to hospital.

The committee released a photograph showing the white vehicle lying overturned on a track next to a wood, with a deep crater beside it and fragments of metal strewn nearby.

The committee later issued a statement saying investigators were questioning a suspect identified as Alexander Permyakov.

“The suspect was detained and, in the course of questioning, he provided testimony that he acted on the instructions of the Ukrainian special services,” said the statement.

The governor of Nizhny Novgorod region, Gleb Nikitin, said on Telegram that doctors had successfully operated on Prilepin and that he was now under sedation to help his recovery.

Russia’s foreign ministry, in a statement on its website, said: “Responsibility for this and other terrorist acts lies not only with Ukrainian authorities, but also their western patrons, the United States in the first instance.”

It said Washington’s failure to denounce this and other attacks was “self-revealing” for the US administration.

State news agency Tass quoted security sources who said the suspect was a “native of Ukraine” with a past conviction for robbery with violence. Ukraine’s SBU Security Service issued its standard response of declining to confirm or deny involvement in the bombing.

Interfax news agency quoted a source in the emergency services who said Prilepin’s condition was serious and doctors would operate on him.

The novelist is an outspoken champion of Russia’s war in Ukraine and has boasted of taking part in military combat there. He is the third prominent pro-war figure to have been targeted by a bomb since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour in February 2022.

Russia has blamed Ukraine for the deaths of journalist Darya Dugina and war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky in the two previous attacks, for which Kyiv has denied involvement.

The Ukrainian presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, said he believed Russian authorities had staged the latest attack.
“Everyone understands that this is all a staged performance,” Podolyak told Ukrainian television. “This is staged and the bombings at the Kremlin are aimed at domestic audiences.”

The Ukrainian news site Unian ran an online poll asking readers who “in the pantheon of Russian scum propagandists” should be targeted next after Dugina, Tatarsky and Prilepin.

The Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram: “The fact has come true: Washington and Nato fed another international terrorist cell – the Kyiv regime.”

She said it was the “direct responsibility of the US and Britain”, but provided no evidence to support the accusation. US officials at the White House, Pentagon and state department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. No comment was immediately available from Britain’s Foreign Office.

It is the second time this week that Moscow has accused Ukraine of carrying out terrorist attacks on behalf of the west, a narrative it appears to be pushing with increasing urgency but which Kyiv and Washington reject as baseless.

On Wednesday, Russia accused Ukraine of trying to kill President Vladimir Putin with a night-time drone attack on the Kremlin. Ukraine denied that too, and the White House said accusations that Washington had a hand in it were “lies”.

Tass quoted Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, who said he was declining to comment on Saturday’s car bomb in the absence of information from investigators.

The news agency said former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev had sent a telegram to Prilepin, calling the incident “a vile attack by Nazi extremists”.

Prilepin often speaks out in support of the Ukraine war on social media, 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 Donbas region before last year’s invasion and led a military unit there, boasting in a 2019 YouTube interview that his unit “killed people in big numbers”.

“These people are dead, they are buried and there are many of them,” he said. “Not a single unit among the Donetsk battalions had such results. It was outrageous chaos what we did there … Not a single field commander had such results as I had.”