A distinguished Russian nationalist author, Zakhar Prilepin, was wounded in a automotive bombing that killed his driver on Saturday, an assault that Russia instantly blamed on Ukraine and the West.

The state Investigative Committee stated the author’s Audi Q7 was blown up in a village within the Nizny Novgorod area, about 400 km (250 miles) east of Moscow, which it was treating as an act of terrorism. It stated he had been taken to hospital.

An inside ministry spokeswoman stated a suspect had been arrested.

It was the third bomb assault on a number one pro-war determine inside Russia since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine started in February 2022. Russia has blamed Ukraine for the deaths of the 2 earlier targets, which Kyiv has denied. There was no rapid phrase from Ukraine on the newest incident.

Russian International Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram: “The actual fact has come true: Washington and NATO fed one other worldwide terrorist cell – the Kyiv regime.”

She stated it was the “direct accountability of the U.S. and Britain”, however supplied no proof to assist the accusation.

“We pray for Zakhar,” she stated.

State information company TASS quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as declining to remark within the absence of data from investigators.

The company stated former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev had despatched a telegram to Prilepin, calling the incident “a vile assault by Nazi extremists”.

Prilepin is a novelist who is named an outspoken supporter of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the place Moscow’s invasion is in its fifteenth month. He’s a prolific exponent of nationalist views, with greater than 300,000 followers on Telegram and his personal web site and YouTube channel.

He fought for Russian proxy forces in jap Ukraine’s area of Donbas earlier than Moscow’s full-scale invasion final 12 months and led a army unit there, boasting in a 2019 YouTube interview that his unit “killed individuals in huge numbers”.

“These persons are useless, they’re buried and… there are various of them,” he stated. “Not a single unit among the many Donetsk battalions had such outcomes. It was outrageous chaos what we did there… Not a single discipline commander had such outcomes as I had.”

Saturday’s incident adopted the assassination of a army blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, in a restaurant in St Petersburg final month. Final August Darya Dugina, the daughter of a nationalist ideologue, was killed in a automotive bombing close to Moscow.