May 6 (Reuters) – A outstanding Russian nationalist writer, Zakhar Prilepin, was wounded in a car bombing that killed his driver on Saturday, an assault that Russia instantly blamed on Ukraine and the West.
The state Investigative Committee mentioned the writer’s Audi Q7 was blown up in a village in the Nizny Novgorod area, about 400 km (250 miles) east of Moscow, which it was treating as an act of terrorism. It mentioned he had been taken to hospital.
An inside ministry spokeswoman mentioned a suspect had been arrested.
It was the third bomb assault on a number one pro-war determine inside Russia since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine started in February 2022. Russia has blamed Ukraine for the deaths of the 2 earlier targets, which Kyiv has denied. There was no rapid phrase from Ukraine on the most recent incident.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram: “The fact has come true: Washington and NATO fed another international terrorist cell – the Kyiv regime.”
She mentioned it was the “direct responsibility of the U.S. and Britain”, however supplied no proof to assist the accusation.
“We pray for Zakhar,” she mentioned.
State information company TASS quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as declining to remark in the absence of data from investigators.
The company mentioned former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev had despatched a telegram to Prilepin, calling the incident “a vile attack by Nazi extremists”.
Prilepin is a novelist who is called an outspoken supporter of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the place Moscow’s invasion is in its 15th month. He is a prolific exponent of nationalist views, with greater than 300,000 followers on Telegram and his personal web site and YouTube channel.
He fought for Russian proxy forces in jap Ukraine’s area of Donbas earlier than Moscow’s full-scale invasion final yr and led a army 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 mentioned. “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.”
Saturday’s incident adopted the assassination of a army blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, in a restaurant in St Petersburg final month. Last August Darya Dugina, the daughter of a nationalist ideologue, was killed in a car bombing close to Moscow.
Reporting by Reuters
Editing by Peter Graff
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
