A military court in Moscow sentenced a man to life in prison on Monday after finding him guilty of attempting to assassinate prominent Russian nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin in a car bombing last year, the Interfax news agency reported.
Alexander Permyakov, who holds both Russian and Ukrainian passports according to Russian media, was arrested soon after the attack on May 6, 2023 near the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, about 400 km east of Moscow. Prilepin’s legs were broken in the attack and his driver was killed.
Permyakov confessed to the crime, saying he had acted on instructions from Ukraine’s SBU security service and had been promised $20,000 to complete the job, Russian state media reported. The SBU has declined to confirm or deny its involvement.
The author of half a dozen novels, Prilepin, 49, often speaks out in support of the Ukraine war on his website, YouTube channel and on Telegram, where he has about 300,000 followers.
For years, he organised Russian proxy forces in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region and led a military unit there, boasting in a 2019 YouTube interview that his unit had “killed people in big numbers”.
Prilepin is one of several prominent Russian pro-war figures to be targeted in bomb attacks.
Darya Dugina, daughter of ultra-nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, was killed near Moscow in August 2022 by a car bomb that many suspected was intended for her father.
In April 2023, well-known Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky was killed after a package he was handed in a cafe in St Petersburg blew up. In January, a 26-year-old woman was jailed for 27 years for delivering the bomb.