Car bomb wounds exiled pro-Kremlin Ukrainian official in Moscow

A magnetic bomb tore through the underside of Sergei Zavorotny's SUV in the south of Moscow on Friday, leaving the 72-year-old in serious condition in a local hospital. Passersby gave him first aid on the roadside before an ambulance arrived. Russian investigators have opened cases for attempted murder and terrorism.

Zavorotny is not a random victim. He served as press aide to former Ukrainian prime minister Mykola Azarov in Kyiv until 2014, the year Viktor Yanukovych's government fell and Azarov fled to Russia, where he tried and failed to establish a government in exile. Zavorotny stayed on as a close Azarov confidant, reinvented himself as a journalist and commentator, and has been wanted by Ukrainian security services ever since. Kyiv has sanctioned both Azarov and Yanukovych, and a Ukrainian court sentenced the former president in absentia to 13 years for treason in 2019. Zavorotny once described the sanctions against his old boss to Russia's RBC as a Ukrainian-style McCarthyism in which officials snap to attention at the orders of overseas supervisors.

The Moscow blast came a day after a second device killed a Russian serviceman driving on the Kolpino highway in St Petersburg's Pushinsky district shortly after 7am on Thursday; a family member travelling with him was wounded by shrapnel. The local outlet Fontanka reported the victim was a colonel. The pattern is by now well established. Darya Dugina died in a car bombing in 2022, a device believed to have been meant for her father, Aleksandr Dugin. General Igor Kirillov was killed in December 2024 by a bomb hidden in a scooter parked outside his residence. In April 2025, General Yaroslav Moskalik, deputy head of the General Staff's main operations directorate, died when a homemade charge went off under his Volkswagen Golf in a residential neighbourhood.

None of these killings has been claimed. They have punctuated every phase of the war's diplomacy, including the round that just concluded in Abu Dhabi, where Russian and Ukrainian delegations agreed to exchange more than a thousand prisoners each and left the land question exactly where they found it. Whoever is attaching bombs to cars in Moscow and St Petersburg has no obvious stake in those talks widening into a ceasefire, and nothing in the past week's record suggests they expect one.

Zavorotny, at 72, is the oldest target in the series so far. On Friday he remained in serious condition in a Moscow hospital, and no one had claimed the device that put him there.