World News | Russia says bomber that wounded novelist acted on behalf of Ukraine

TALLINN (Estonia) May 6 (AP) – Russia’s top investigative body said Saturday that the suspect in the car bombing that wounded a prominent pro-Kremlin novelist and killed his driver admitted to being in Ukrainian special forces. Act upon request.

The car explosion of Zakhar Prilepin, a prominent nationalist author and ardent supporter of Russia’s war on Ukraine, was the third explosion involving a prominent pro-Kremlin figure since the conflict began.

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It happened in the Nizhny Novgorod region, about 400 kilometers (250 miles) east of Moscow.

Russia’s Investigative Committee said the suspect was Ukrainian and admitted during interrogation that he worked under Ukraine’s orders.

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The foreign ministry in turn blamed not only Ukraine, but also the United States.

“Responsibility for this and other acts of terrorism lies not only with the Ukrainian authorities, but also with their Western patrons, first of all the United States, which has been painstakingly cultivating a new anti-Russian force since the February 2014 coup. The Nazis in Ukraine projects,” the ministry said, referring to the 2014 uprising in Kiev that forced the Russia-friendly president to flee.

In August 2022, a car bombing on the outskirts of Moscow killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of an influential Russian political theorist, often referred to as “Putin’s brain.” Authorities claimed Ukraine was behind the blast.

Last month, an explosion at a café in St. Petersburg killed Vladlen Tatarsky, a popular military blogger. Officials again blamed Ukrainian intelligence agencies.

Russian news outlet RBC reported, citing unnamed sources, that Prilepin returned to Moscow on Saturday from Ukraine’s partly occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions and stopped for dinner in the Nizhny Novgorod region.

Prilepin became a supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2014 after Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea. He has sided with Russia-backed separatists in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. He was sanctioned by the European Union last year for supporting Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In 2020, he founded a political party called “For the Truth,” which, according to Russian media reports, has the support of the Kremlin. A year later, Prilepin’s party merged with the nationalist Just Russia party, which holds seats in parliament.

As co-chairman of the newly formed party, Plepin won a seat in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, in the 2021 elections but later relinquished it.

Party leader Sergei Mironov called the incident an “act of terrorism” on Saturday and blamed Ukraine. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova echoed Mironov’s sentiments in a post on the messaging app Telegram, adding that the responsibility also lay with the US and NATO.

“Washington and NATO fostered another international terrorist organization – the Kiev regime,” Zakharova wrote. “The US and UK are directly responsible. We are praying for Zakhar.”

In a telegram sent to Prilepin, former President Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, blamed “Nazi extremists”.

Ukrainian officials have not commented directly on the allegations. However, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak appeared to take aim at the Kremlin in a tweet on Saturday, saying Russia’s repressive machine stepped up and caught up to everyone “in order to prolong the suffering of the Putin family and maintain illusory total control.” ,” including supporters of the war in Ukraine. (AP)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the body of content may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)