Photo: Юрий Д.К., via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
A car bomb exploded in Moscow on Friday, hospitalizing a former aide to Ukraine's exiled pro-Russian prime minister — the second car bombing inside Russia in two days, in what appears to be a growing campaign of attacks far from the front lines of the war in Ukraine.
Russia's Investigative Committee, which handles serious crimes, said it had opened an investigation into the explosion. Russian media reported that the car belonged to Sergei Zavorotniy, a onetime spokesperson for former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, who has been living in Russia since fleeing Ukraine during the anti-government protests of 2014.
The newspaper Kommersant reported that Zavorotniy was hospitalized. Russian television channel Ren TV and the 112 Telegram channel reported that he had lost his left arm in the blast and was being treated for a concussion, rib fractures and other injuries.
There was no immediate comment from Ukraine on Friday, and no group claimed responsibility for the attack.
Who was targeted
Zavorotniy served as a spokesperson for Azarov, the prime minister who fled Ukraine in 2014 after the Maidan protests toppled the government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Azarov has lived in exile in Russia ever since, and his former aides remain figures of interest in the long-running confrontation between Kyiv and Moscow.
Russian media said the explosion struck Zavorotniy's car in Moscow. The Baza Telegram channel published a photograph of a black four-door car with a smashed windshield and damaged doors and front bumper on a city street.
A deadly blast a day earlier
The Moscow bombing came a day after a Russian military officer was killed when a bomb exploded under his car in St. Petersburg. Investigators opened a murder inquiry after the blast, which detonated on the Kolpino Highway in the city's Pushkinsky District at around 7 a.m. local time on Thursday.
Russian media reported that the bomb had been strapped to the underside of the vehicle. Some reports identified the victim as a colonel. An Associated Press photograph from the scene showed a law enforcement officer inspecting the wreckage of the car.
The two bombings, a day apart and hundreds of miles from each other, have raised questions about whether Ukraine's intelligence services — or groups acting in their name — are carrying out a deliberate campaign against figures linked to Russia's war effort inside Russia itself.
A pattern of attacks inside Russia
The Independent described the Moscow blast as the latest in a series of apparent assassination attempts inside Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022. Senior Russian military officers and officials have been targeted in a string of bombings and shootings in Moscow and St. Petersburg, several of which Ukraine has later acknowledged.
Kyiv has generally declined to comment on individual attacks, and it said nothing about Friday's explosion. But Ukrainian officials have made no secret of their view that the war must be carried onto Russian territory, and Ukraine's drone campaign against Russian refineries, airfields and military sites has grown steadily bolder — most recently reaching a Russian warship in the Baltic Sea.
Violence as talks continue
The bombings came in the same week that American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner shuttled between Moscow and Dublin in a renewed push for a settlement, meeting President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin and President Volodymyr Zelensky in Ireland.
The talks produced no breakthrough, though the two sides agreed on a large-scale prisoner exchange that Zelensky hailed as a "real result." Putin agreed, according to a US envoy, to let European representatives join the next round of negotiations, but ruled out foreign peacekeeping troops in Ukraine, warning that such a deployment would be a "continuation of war."
For now, the violence on both sides continues — on the battlefield, where Russian strikes knocked out power in 12 Ukrainian regions overnight, and in Russian cities, where the war is arriving in the form of bombs under cars.
Sources: The Independent, Kommersant, Associated Press.