Russian nationalist writer wounded in car bombing, one dead

By Mark Trevelyan

(Reuters) -A prominent Russian nationalist writer, Zakhar Prilepin, was wounded in a car bombing on Saturday that Russia immediately blamed on Ukraine and the West.

TASS news agency quoted the interior ministry as saying one person had been killed in the blast in the Nizny Novgorod region, about 400 km (250 miles) east of Moscow.

A ministry spokeswoman said a suspect had been arrested.

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 said it was the “direct responsibility of the U.S. and Britain”, but provided no evidence to support the accusation.

“We pray for Zakhar,” she said.

TASS quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as declining to comment in the absence of information from investigators.

Prilepin is a novelist who is 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 region of Donbas before the full-scale invasion in February 2022 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.”

Two leading pro-war Russian propagandists have been killed in bombings since Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year.

Darya Dugina, the daughter of a nationalist ideologue, died in a car bombing near Moscow in August, while military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky was killed in a bomb attack in a St Petersburg cafe last month.

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