MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian court on Monday convicted a man convicted of a car bombing that seriously injured people nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin to life in prison.
Prosecutors said the May 2023 bombing in the Nizhny Novogorod region was carried out at the direction of Ukrainian security services. Prilepin was seriously injured and his driver was killed in the bombing.
The convicted defendant, Alexander Permyakov, is from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and once fought with Russian-backed separatists there, news reports say.
Prilepin was known for his vehement defense of both the Russian-backed rebels from eastern Ukraine who rose in 2014 and the Russian fighting in Ukraine that began in February 2022.
Since Russia sent troops to Ukraine, two prominent nationalist figures have been killed. Darya Dugina, a commentator on Russian TV channels and the daughter of Kremlin-linked ideologue Alexander Dugin, were killed in an August 2022 car bomb attack that investigators suspected targeted her father.
Vladlen Tatarsky, a well-known military blogger died in April 2023 when a statue given to him at a party in St. Petersburg exploded. Russian political activist Darya Trepova was sentenced to 27 years in the case. She said she was following orders from a contact in Ukraine.