Moscow: car bomb seriously injures Serhiy Zavorotny, former adviser to Ukraine’s ex-prime minister Azarov

A car bomb in Moscow seriously injured Serhiy Zavorotny on Friday, November 13. He is a former adviser and press secretary to Mykola Azarov, Ukraine’s former prime minister. Russia’s Investigative Committee announced that it opened a criminal case over the explosion of a passenger car on Kirovogradskaya Street, in the south of the city. In a second statement it named the injured man: Zavorotny was driving the vehicle himself and was taken to a city hospital, where he is being treated. The attack came a day after another booby-trapped car explosion in Saint Petersburg that cost the life of a Russian serviceman.

The Committee named no suspects and said it will order a series of expert examinations, including forensic and explosives analysis. Russian outlets such as REN TV wrote that the 72-year-old lost his left hand, suffered multiple injuries and is in a coma. Azarov himself told Russian state television he is “shocked” and that the condition of his former associate is “quite critical.” According to Azarov, Zavorotny was targeted because of his criticism of the Ukrainian government. Unconfirmed reports speak of an explosive device under the car, detonated remotely.

Who Zavorotny is

Zavorotny worked as a journalist for the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda before becoming Azarov’s adviser in Kyiv, a post he held until 2014. Azarov was prime minister under the presidency of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych and fled to Russia after Yanukovych’s ouster in February 2014. Zavorotny wrote a book about Yanukovych’s overthrow and ran an online outlet critical of the Ukrainian authorities. A 2020 report of the US Senate Intelligence Committee on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election described him as an officer of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) who took part in influence operations, as the Guardian and the BBC note.

A second car explosion in two days

The explosion of Thursday, November 12, took place in the morning in the Pushkinsky district of Saint Petersburg, an area where many servicemen live. The Investigative Committee said a serviceman was killed, without giving his name. Russian media describe him as an Air Force colonel, while the BBC writes that, according to credible sources, he was a senior officer of the 6th Guards Air and Air Defence Forces Army. In both cases the target was driving the car when the bomb went off. Moscow attributes the series of attacks to Kyiv, while Ukrainian authorities have not commented on either blast.

The explosions came as Russia and Ukraine exchange strikes on each other’s territory. On the same day the Investigative Committee opened a terrorism case over a Ukrainian attack on an industrial zone in the Volgograd region, where four workers were killed, after the night in which Moscow said it shot down 1,198 Ukrainian drones. Ukraine, for its part, reported that a Russian drone hit a hospital in Kyiv the same night.