Car bombing injures prominent Russian nationalist writer, state media reports

A car bombing Saturday wounded a prominent Russian nationalist and novelist while killing his driver, state media reported, one of a series of internal attacks that is spreading a sense of disarray even as the country gears up to celebrate its most important annual military holiday.

The writer and Ukraine combat veteran, Zakhar Prilepin, was injured but conscious, the state-run Tass news agency reported. Preliminary information showed that an explosive device had been planted under Prilepin’s car in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, Tass reported, but did not say who was believed to be behind the attack.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova called it a “terrorist bombing,” saying in a statement on the Telegram messaging app that Prilepin’s driver had been killed.

It was the second such attack within a week that authorities have referred to as a “terrorist” incident, and comes amid growing unease among Russia’s military and political leadership as they brace for a looming Ukrainian counteroffensive in the war that has dragged on for 14 months. Other attacks have included two explosions Wednesday over the Kremlin, which did little damage but carried heavy symbolic weight, plus blasts that ignited oil storage facilities and derailed at least two trains in Russia.

The governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, Gleb Nikitin, wrote on Telegram that Prilepin suffered minor fractures and that there was “no threat to his health.”

The blast that injured Prilepin on Saturday was also the third explosion to target a leading Russian nationalist figure in the past year. In April, a bombing at a St. Petersburg cafe killed a popular pro-war blogger known as Vladlen Tatarsky. And a car bombing last August killed Daria Dugina, a hawk and the daughter of another famous Russian nationalist.

U.S. intelligence agencies said some months later that they believed that parts of the Ukrainian government authorized that attack.

Russia’s Investigative Committee said it had opened a criminal case into the Saturday attack and had sent investigators to the scene. A photograph shared by the committee on Telegram showed a white car flipped upside down, with what appeared to be its front half blown off, next to a crater.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.