A car bomb in Moscow wounds the man who once spoke for Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin prime minister, a day after a deadly blast in St Petersburg

A car bomb has exploded in southern Moscow, wounding Sergei Zavorotny, a former spokesman and later top aide to Mykola Azarov, the pro-Russian prime minister who fled Ukraine in 2014.

Russia’s Investigative Committee said the 72-year-old was driving the vehicle when it exploded on Friday on Kirovogradskaya Street in the Chertanovo district, and that he had been taken to hospital. It has opened an attempted murder case. He is in hospital in a serious condition, and passers-by gave him first aid at the scene, according to reports in Russia.

Russian media outlets reported that he lost his left arm and suffered a concussion and broken ribs. Investigators have not confirmed the extent of his injuries.

Images published on Russian Telegram channels showed a black four-door car with its windscreen, doors and front bumper smashed.

Who is Sergei Zavorotny?

Zavorotny was a foreign correspondent in Latin America for the Soviet newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda before he became the voice of Azarov’s government in Kyiv. Azarov was Ukraine’s prime minister from 2010 to 2014, under President Viktor Yanukovych.

When the Maidan protests ousted Yanukovych in 2014, after a crackdown in which more than 100 demonstrators were killed in Kyiv, both men fled to Russia, and Zavorotny followed. In Russia he worked as a political commentator, writing critiques of Ukraine’s security establishment.

A Ukrainian court sentenced Yanukovych in absentia to 13 years for treason in 2019, and Kyiv has since sanctioned both Yanukovych and Azarov. Zavorotny once described those sanctions as “Ukrainian-style McCarthyism”.

Azarov told Russian state media he knew nothing about the bombing beyond the fact that his former aide had survived.

Who is being blamed?

Preliminary findings reported in Russia say a magnetic bomb had been attached beneath the SUV, and investigators are reportedly examining possible involvement by Ukrainian intelligence. Some Russian channels have floated other explanations, including a fault in the car’s gas equipment. None has been confirmed.

Ukraine had not commented on Friday. Ukrainian sources have claimed some attacks inside Russia and denied involvement in others, while Moscow has blamed Kyiv for earlier killings of senior military officers and people linked to Russia.

Is this part of a pattern?

Russian investigators described Friday’s blast as the second of its kind in the country in two days. On Thursday, a car bomb in St Petersburg killed a member of the Russian military; a local broadcaster reported he was a colonel in the Aerospace Forces. In August, another Russian officer was killed in a car explosion in the same part of St Petersburg.

The timing is sensitive. US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Vladimir Putin in Moscow this week and then Volodymyr Zelensky in Dublin, and both sides have agreed to keep talking. Car bombings deep inside Russia have repeatedly raised tensions during earlier rounds of negotiation.

For Australian readers the stakes are not distant: Canberra has backed Ukraine with military aid and sanctions on Russia since 2022, and every stalled round of talks prolongs a war that has pushed up energy and food prices around the world.

VNN will update this story as more is confirmed.