Ukraine's clandestine operations have once again reached the Russian rear, although responsibility for the two new attacks remains unofficially claimed. A car bomb in Moscow on Friday wounded a former spokesman for a pro-Russian former Ukrainian prime minister. It is the second explosion of its kind in the country in two days. The latest victim is Sergei Zavorotniy, who was one of the main advisors of Mykola Azarov, Prime Minister of Ukraine between 2010 and 2014, during the era of the deposed Viktor Yanukovych.
Zavorotniy was hospitalized after the car he was driving exploded on a street in Chertanovo, a district of the Russian capital, according to a police statement, which indicates that he lost his left arm in the attack and is hospitalized with a concussion and other injuries. Other Russian media talk about an induced coma. Moscow has blamed Ukraine for previous killings of top military commanders and people linked to Russia. Ukraine did not comment on Friday.
Zavorotniy became Azarov's top adviser after a career as a foreign correspondent in Latin America during the Soviet era for the Moscow-based Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.
The bomb that arrived in a balloon
This explosion is the latest in a series of assassination attempts inside Russia. On Thursday, a member of the Russian military was killed by a car bomb in St. Petersburg. Its driver, a 51-year-old colonel, died instantly. According to Kommersant, he was a colonel in the 6th Army of the Air Force and Air Defense, which protects the Russian northwest. 'Kommersant' identifies him as Dimitri Lobodin, but the ASTRA channel had also investigated the possibility that he was Andrei Jodykin. The bomb, placed under the vehicle, would have a power equivalent to half a kilo of dynamite and even broke the windows of a bus with 30 or 40 passengers, who were unharmed. For this attack there is already a main suspect: an investigation by the Russian media 'Fontanka' points to a Russian named Yan, 31 years old, born in Pskov, in western Russia. On his social media profile he sports tattoos and dreadlocks in his photos and apparently he had worked in movie theaters and accumulated too many debts.
The police had some history on him: in March 2022 he was detained during an unauthorized protest in St. Petersburg and sentenced to ten days of administrative arrest. According to data cited by the newspaper, he donated money to Alexey Navalny's Anti-Corruption Fund, currently banned in Russia.
Although no evidence of his involvement in the crime has been presented, Russian police have managed to reconstruct their surveillance of the target and his escape. A month before, Yan worked as a warehouse boy in a Lenta hypermarket near the colonel's home. He took note of when the soldier arrived, where he left the car and what time he left for work. This would have calculated the moment to plant the bomb and flee.
The decisive moment was in the middle of the night: the bomb was placed around one in the morning, according to the Fontanka newspaper. At 2:43 in the morning, Yan had already taken a flight to Istanbul; landed at 6.05. From there he went to Chisinau, capital of Moldova. The device was activated remotely (from Ukraine, aided by a camera) or by detecting the movement of the vehicle. When the colonel took off at seven and traveled about 300 meters, the suspect was already safely outside of Russia. According to Fontanka, the device was placed following instructions from the Ukrainian intelligence agency.
The attack has followed the modus operandi of other Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil: a person from outside Ukraine does it for money and leaves (or tries to leave) the country before the police arrive at the crime scene. The most recent precedent occurred in August, in practically the same place: another car bomb killed an air defense lieutenant colonel and seriously injured his wife. Then a suspect, a 24-year-old girl, was pointed out. Like Yan, he also escaped via Türkiye to Moldova.
In this case, the most striking thing is how the material preparation was: the explosive would have entered the Leningrad region transported by balloon from the Baltic countries. An accomplice - still unidentified - picked him up near the border and hid him until Yan got hold of him, according to Fontanka media security sources.
kyiv has not claimed responsibility for either of the two attacks this week. But Ukraine did recognize other operations, including the assassination in Moscow of General Igor Kirilov in December 2024, using a bomb hidden in a scooter.
