A car bomb wounded Sergei Zavorotniy, a onetime spokesman for Ukraine's pro-Russian former prime minister Mykola Azarov, in Moscow on Friday, November 13, 2026, according to Yahoo News, citing a statement from Russian investigators. It was the second car bombing to hit Russia in two days, after a member of the Russian military was killed by a similar device in St Petersburg on Thursday.
Zavorotniy was driving through Chertanovo, a district of the Russian capital, when the vehicle exploded. He was hospitalised with serious injuries. Russia's Investigative Committee, the body that handles serious crimes, has opened an investigation.
What we know about the Moscow explosion
Russian outlets Ren TV and the 112 Telegram channel reported that Zavorotniy lost his left arm in the blast and was being treated for a concussion, rib fractures and other injuries. The Baza Telegram channel published a photograph of a black four-door car with a smashed windshield, doors and front bumper on a city street.
There was no immediate comment from Kyiv on Friday, and Ukrainian officials have not commented on Thursday's St Petersburg attack either. Moscow has blamed Ukraine for previous assassinations of senior military officials and people linked to Russia, while Ukrainian sources have claimed responsibility in some cases and denied involvement in others, as DW noted in its rolling coverage.
Who is Sergei Zavorotniy?
Zavorotniy served as a top aide to Mykola Azarov, Ukraine's prime minister from 2010 to 2014. Before that, he was a foreign correspondent in Latin America during the Soviet era for the Moscow-based Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, which at its peak circulated 21 million copies a day.
Alexander Kots, who covers the Ukraine war for that newspaper, described Zavorotniy on Friday as a historian of Latin America who wrote his doctoral thesis on Cuba. Kots wrote that Zavorotniy once chatted with Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez in a hotel lobby in Mexico and had penetrated the inner circle of former US-backed Chilean military ruler Augusto Pinochet.
After moving to Russia in 2014, Zavorotniy worked as a political commentator, writing articles critical of the Ukrainian security establishment. He had defended Azarov against Kyiv's sanctions, calling them emblematic of what he described to Russia's RBC newspaper as