Russia accuses Ukraine and the US of blowing up the car in which Zajar Prilepin, a well-known writer close to Vladimir Putin, was traveling

Famous Russian writer Zajar Prilepin, close to Vladimir Putin, was the victim of an attack on Saturday when his car exploded in Nizhny Novgorod, injuring him and killing his driver, and from the Kremlin accuse Ukraine and the United States for the attack. Shortly thereafter, a Ukrainian citizen was arrested, who claimed that he acted on the orders of his country’s special services.

“Responsibility for this terrorist act, and others, it falls not only on Ukraine, but also on its Western godparents, primarily the United StatesThe Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Prilepin, 47, is a prominent figure of the Russian literary scene and has been translated into numerous countries. In 2014 he pledged to support pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, with whom he has fought.

Since then, this veteran of the Chechen wars of the 90s, regularly travels to eastern Ukraine and defends President Vladimir Putin and its massive offensive against the neighboring country, launched on February 24, 2022. Very present in the Russian media, it is also active in patriotic and traditionalist movements in Russia.

The detained Ukrainian citizen was identified as Alexandr Permyakov. According to the Russian government, he confessed during interrogation that “acted on the instructions of the Ukrainian special services“.

According to his testimony, he did not place the explosive device under Prilepin’s car as previously reported by Russian security forces, but instead he deposited it somewhere along the road through which the writer circulated in the Nizhny Novogorod region, east of Moscow.

“In the Nizhny Novogorod region, police officers arrested a man they were pursuing who may have been involved in the explosion of the car in which Zakhar Prilepin was travelling,” Russian Interior Ministry spokeswoman Irina Volk said.

Sources from Russian security agencies told the official TASS news agency that it is a Citizen of Ukraine born in 1993 with a criminal recordtried in his country for a robbery.

The commission of inquiry of Russia described the attack on the writer as a ‘terrorist act’who fought between 2016 and 2018 in Donbass and is currently fighting in Ukraine after signing a contract with the National Guard, his spokesman told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper in January.

The Interior Ministry confirmed that Prilepin was injured and that another person died, who was the one who was driving and was his assistant. The writer suffered minor fractures, according to the governor of the region Gleb Nikitin.

According to TASS, under Pripelin’s car was an explosive device with a yield of more than two kilograms of trinitrotoluene, or TNT.

Revenge by the Ukrainian resistance is believed to be the reason for the attack, according to Russian security agency sources, which are investigating the event.

It is not the first attack against figures close to Putin

On April 2, well-known military blogger Vladlen Tatarski, a staunch supporter of the Russian military campaign in Ukraine, died from an explosion in a bar in St. Petersburg.

According to Russia, the organizers of the assassination were “Ukrainian secret services and their agents, including those of the exiled Russian opposition”.

On March 6, the Federal Security Service (FSB) said it had prevented an attack, allegedly also prepared by Ukraine, against the chairman of the board of directors of the Tsargrad media group, Konstantin Malofeev.

And on August 20, 2022, the car of journalist Daria Dugin, daughter of Alexandr Dugin, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, exploded in the Moscow region causing his death. Russia has attributed the attack to a citizen of Ukraine.

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