Car bomb in Moscow injures exiled Ukrainian political aide in second blast in two days

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A car exploded in Moscow on Friday, injuring a man Russian media identified as an exiled Ukrainian political aide, Russia's Investigative Committee said it had opened an investigation into the blast. The committee, which handles serious crimes, said it was examining the explosion of a car in the Russian capital. Russian media reported the car belonged to Sergei Zavorotniy, a former spokesman for ex-Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, who has lived in Russia since fleeing Ukraine during the anti-government protests of 2014.

Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that Zavorotniy was hospitalised after the explosion. No claim of responsibility has been reported, and the Investigative Committee has not said what caused the blast or who might have planted a device. The explosion is the latest in a series of apparent assassination attempts inside Russia. On Thursday, a member of the Russian military was killed after the car he was driving was blown up in St Petersburg, investigators said.

The two bombings, a day apart and in Russia's two largest cities, follow nearly five years of full-scale war in Ukraine and a long-running shadow campaign of killings and sabotage on both sides. The Moscow blast stands out because its reported target is a political figure from the pre-2014 Ukrainian government who has lived in exile in Russia for more than a decade, rather than a serving military officer.

The facts of the explosion and the investigation come from Reuters reporting of the Investigative Committee's statement, while the identification of the car's owner and his hospitalisation come from Russian media reports, principally Kommersant, which Reuters cited but could not independently verify. Whether Zavorotniy was the intended target, rather than simply the owner of the car, has not been established by the reporting available, and no official account of the device or the motive has been published.

The incident will be read in Moscow as a test of whether the security services can protect even figures on their own side of the war, and in Kyiv as another sign that the conflict's covert front has moved deep into Russian cities. Until the Investigative Committee publishes its findings, the motive and the perpetrators remain unknown, and the two bombings stand as a pair of unexplained attacks with no one claiming them.