MOSCOW, Nov 13 (Reuters) – A car bomb in Moscow wounded a onetime spokesman for a pro-Russian former prime minister of Ukraine on Friday, Russian investigators said, the second such explosion in the country in two days.
Sergei Zavorotniy, once a top aide to Mykola Azarov – Ukraine’s prime minister from 2010 to 2014 – was hospitalised after a car he was driving blew up on a street in Chertanovo, a district of the Russian capital, the investigators’ statement said.
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.
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 windshield, doors and front bumper on a city street.
Russia’s Investigative Committee, which handles serious crimes, said it was investigating the incident.
Zavorotniy’s former boss Azarov fled to Russia in 2014, when Ukrainian street protests which became known as the Maidan Revolution ousted pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych after he backed away from a pledge to develop closer ties with the European Union.
Azarov told Russia’s TASS state news agency on Friday that he had no information about the car bomb, except that Zavorotniy had survived.
The explosion was the latest in a series of apparent assassination attempts inside Russia. On Thursday a member of the Russian military was killed by a car bomb in St Petersburg.
Ukrainian sources have claimed responsibility in some cases, while denying involvement others. Kyiv has not commented on Thursday’s attack.
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT TO POLITICAL COMMENTATOR
Azarov and Yanukovych fled for Russia after more than 100 demonstrators were killed in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv as security forces cracked down on 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.
Zavorotniy became Azarov’s top aide after a career as a foreign correspondent in Latin America during the Soviet era for the Moscow-based Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, which had a peak daily circulation of 21 million copies.
Alexander Kots, who covers the Ukraine war for the newspaper, described Zavorotniy in an article on Friday as a historian of Latin America who wrote his doctoral thesis on Cuba.
He said Zavorotniy had once chatted with Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez in a hotel lobby in Mexico and had penetrated the inner circle of former US-backed Chilean military ruler Augusto Pinochet.
After Zavorotniy moved to Russia in 2014, he began working as a political commentator, writing articles criticising the Ukrainian security establishment, according to Kots.
(Reporting by Reuters, Writing by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Philippa Fletcher)
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