A onetime spokesman to former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov was hospitalized in serious condition Friday after an explosion beneath his SUV in southern Moscow, the second such explosion in the country in two days.
Russia’s Investigative Committee confirmed that Sergei Zavorotny, 72, was driving the vehicle when the blast occurred and was taken to a Moscow hospital. Kommersant said he was driving on Kirovogradskaya Ulitsa in the Chertanovo district and that passersby gave him first aid.
Investigators opened an attempted murder case. Kommersant said preliminary findings indicated that a magnetic bomb had been attached beneath the SUV and reported that investigators were looking into possible involvement by Ukrainian intelligence services.
There was no immediate comment from Ukraine on Friday.
Born in the Russian Far East city of Khabarovsk, Zavorotny worked as a foreign correspondent in Latin America for the Moscow-based tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda during the Soviet era. He later became Azarov’s top aide.
He moved to Russia after the 2014 Maidan Revolution that toppled President Viktor Yanukovych and went on to voice pro-Kremlin and anti-Western views.
U.S. intelligence previously identified Zavorotny as an officer in Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, according to a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
In 2018, Zavorotny presented a book he co-wrote about Yanukovych’s downfall at the Biblio-Globus bookstore in Moscow. The book’s title portrayed the events of 2014 as a surrender to the U.S. State Department.
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.
Zavorotny 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.
The Moscow blast came a day after a car bomb killed a Russian serviceman in St. Petersburg. The local broadcaster 78.ru reported that the victim was a colonel in the Russian Aerospace Forces.
Another Russian military officer was killed in a car explosion in the same St. Petersburg neighborhood in August.
Reuters contributed reporting.
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