Russian pro-war writer Zakhar Prilepin has said that he was behind the wheel of the car that had been blown up on Saturday 6 May in the Nizhny Novgorod region of Russia, as per a post on his Telegram channel.
“A person close to me, who worked as my guardian angel for eight years. Sasha [Alexander] ‘Angry’ Shubin. Fearless soldier, friend, and brother. I was just handed my phone. The media have gotten it somewhat wrong. Sasha was on the right, in the passenger seat. I was behind the wheel. The explosion happened under his seat. I lost consciousness for around three minutes, woke up, and crawled to the shattered windscreen. The villagers who ran up [to the car] helped me get out. Both of my legs are broken (one of the fractures is open), and some other parts,” Prilepin wrote.
He thanked the Nizhny Novgorod region governor Gleb Nikitin for sending a helicopter, seeing as it takes three hours by car to reach the city from the place of explosion, while the helicopter reached its destination in 16 minutes.
Prilepin was told there were two mines in total but the suspect “got scared and immediately ran away after the first one had exploded”. The writer confirmed that he did, in fact, drop off his daughter just five minutes before the explosions.
“To the demons I say: you won’t scare anyone off. There is God. We will win,” he concluded.
In the morning of 6 May, it was reported that the car the writer was in was blown up in the Nizhny Novgorod region of Russia. Prilepin was hospitalised in critical condition, his security guard Alexander Shubin was killed in the explosion.
Russia’s Investigative Committee detained a suspect. The agency posted a video in which the detained, 29-year-old Donetsk region native Alexander Permyakov, claims that he was acting on the orders of Ukraine’s special services.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry accused the Security Service of Ukraine (SUB) of carrying out the assassination attempt on Prilepin’s life. A SUB representative told Ukrainska Pravda that he could neither confirm nor deny the involvement of Ukraine’s special services in the explosion.
The Crimean Tatar partisan movement Atesh claimed responsibility for the attack.
