Moscow Car Bomb Wounds Ex-Aide to Ukraine’s Former Prime Minister
A car bomb in Moscow has seriously wounded Sergei Zavorotniy, a former spokesman and top aide to Mykola Azarov, Ukraine’s prime minister from 2010 to 2014, Russian investigators said on Friday. The blast was the second such explosion in Russia in two days, and the latest in a series of apparent assassination attempts inside the country since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
Blast in the Chertanovo district
Zavorotniy was hospitalised after the car he was driving blew up on a street in Chertanovo, a district in the south of the Russian capital, according to a statement from Russia’s Investigative Committee, which handles serious crimes. The committee said it was investigating the incident.
Russian media reported more serious injuries than the official statement described. Ren TV and the 112 Telegram channel both reported that Zavorotniy had lost his left arm in the attack and was in hospital with a concussion, rib fractures and other injuries. The Baza Telegram channel published a photograph of a black four-door car with a smashed windscreen, doors and front bumper on a city street.
Azarov told Russia’s TASS state news agency on Friday that he had no information about the car bomb, except that Zavorotniy had survived.
Second blast in two days
The explosion followed the killing of a member of the Russian military by a car bomb in St Petersburg on Thursday. Kyiv has not commented on that attack.
Moscow has blamed Ukraine for previous assassinations of senior military officials and people linked to Russia. There was no immediate comment from Ukraine on Friday about the Moscow blast. Ukrainian sources have claimed responsibility in some cases, while denying involvement in others, Reuters reported.
The two blasts come as the United States tries to mediate an end to the war. US envoys met President Vladimir Putin in Moscow this week, and Washington has been pressing both sides towards talks in Abu Dhabi. But fighting has continued, including a Russian strike on a Ukrainian aid centre in the Zaporizhzhia region this month that killed at least 31 people.
Who is Sergei Zavorotniy?
Zavorotniy became Azarov’s top aide after a career as a foreign correspondent in Latin America during the Soviet era for Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Moscow-based newspaper that once had a peak daily circulation of 21 million copies. He wrote a doctoral thesis on Cuba and, according to the newspaper’s war correspondent Alexander Kots, once chatted with Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez in a hotel lobby in Mexico and penetrated the inner circle of Augusto Pinochet, the former US-backed Chilean military ruler.
After moving to Russia in 2014, Zavorotniy, 72, worked as a political commentator, writing articles critical of the Ukrainian security establishment, Kots wrote.
Azarov fled to Russia in 2014, when the Maidan Revolution ousted the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych after he backed away from a pledge to develop closer ties with the European Union. More than 100 demonstrators were killed in Kyiv as security forces cracked down on the mass protests.
In 2019, a Ukrainian court sentenced Yanukovych to 13 years in prison in absentia for treason, and Kyiv later placed sanctions on him and Azarov. Zavorotniy called the sanctions against his former boss emblematic of “a kind of Ukrainian-style McCarthyism, where local authorities simply ‘snap to attention’ and carry out the orders of their overseas supervisors”, in comments to Russia’s RBC newspaper.
What happens next
Russia’s Investigative Committee has opened an investigation but has not named any suspects or a motive. No group has claimed responsibility for the Moscow blast, and it remains unclear whether the two car bombs this week are connected.
The incident is likely to sharpen questions about security inside Russia, and about whether the campaign of targeted killings is widening beyond military officers to political figures linked to the war. Tensions in the wider region also remain high: Iran this week claimed to have struck a US early-warning radar in Bahrain, a claim Washington has not confirmed.
