TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — A prominent pro-Kremlin novelist’s car exploded in Russia on Saturday, injuring and killing his driver, Russia’s state news agency Tass reported, citing emergency and law enforcement officials. law
The incident involving the car of Zakhar Prilepin, a prominent nationalist writer and an ardent supporter of what the Kremlin calls “special military operations” in Ukraine, took place in the Nizhny Novgorod region, about 400 kilometers (250 miles) east. of Moscow.
This is the third explosion involving prominent pro-Kremlin figures since the war in Ukraine began.
In August 2022, a car bombing outside Moscow killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of an influential Russian political theorist often referred to as “Putin’s brain.” Authorities accused Ukraine of being behind the blast.
Last month, an explosion at a cafe in St. Petersburg killed a popular military blogger, Vladlen Tatarsky. Officials again blamed Ukrainian intelligence agencies.
The regional governor of Niznhy Novgorod, Gleb Nikitin, said Prilepin suffered a minor broken bone and was receiving medical assistance.
Russian news outlet RBC reported, citing unnamed sources, that Prilepin was traveling back to Moscow on Saturday from Ukraine’s partially occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions and stopped in the Nizhny Novogorod region for a meal.
Interior Ministry spokeswoman Irina Volk said a suspect is in custody. Russian news reports identified him as a native of Ukraine who had previously been convicted of theft.
Prilepin became a supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2014, after Putin illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula. He was involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine on the side of Russian-backed separatists. Last year, he was sanctioned by the European Union for his support of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine.
In 2020, he founded a political party, For Truth, which Russian media reported was supported by the Kremlin. A year later, Prilepin’s party merged with the nationalist party A Just Russia with seats in parliament.
A co-chair of the newly formed party, Prilepin won a seat in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, in the 2021 election, but gave it up.
Party leader Sergei Mironov called Saturday’s incident “a terrorist act” and blamed Ukraine. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova echoed Mironov’s sentiments in a post on messaging app Telegram, adding that responsibility rests with the US and NATO.
“Washington and NATO are nurturing another international terrorist cell – the Kyiv regime,” Zakharova wrote. “Direct responsibility of the US and Britain. We are praying for Zakhar.”
The deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council, former President Dmitry Medvedev blamed “Nazi extremists” in a telegram he sent to Prilepin.
Ukrainian officials did not directly comment on the allegations. However, the adviser to the president of Ukraine, Mykhailo Podolyak, in a tweet on Saturday, appeared to point the finger at the Kremlin, saying that “in order to prolong the suffering of the Putin clan and maintain the illusory ‘total control,’ the machine of Russia suppresses the pace and catches up with everyone,” including supporters of the war in Ukraine.