A car bombing has wounded a prominent Russian nationalist writer and killed his driver, state media reported on Saturday.
The state-run Tass news agency said that the writer, Zakhar Prilepin, was wounded but conscious. Preliminary information showed that an explosive device had been planted under Mr. Prilepin’s car in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, Tass reported, but did not say who was believed to be behind the attack.
A Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, called it a “terrorist bombing,” saying in a statement on the Telegram messaging app that Mr. Prilepin’s driver had been killed.
“Our prayers go to Zakhar,” she wrote.
The governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, Gleb Nikitin, said that Mr. Prilepin suffered minor fractures.
“There is no threat to his health,” he wrote on Telegram.
Russia’s Investigative Committee said it had opened a criminal case into the attack and sent investigators and forensic experts to the scene. A photograph shared by the committee on Telegram showed a white car flipped upside down, with what appeared to be its front half blown off, next to a crater.
Mr. Prilepin — who fought in eastern Ukraine in support of a separatist rebellion fomented and armed by Moscow — has long advocated an imperialist foreign policy. In 2021, he was elected to Russia’s Parliament — a sign of the nationalists’ rising stature in President Vladimir V. Putin’s system — but gave up his seat.
After a car bombing in August killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of another famous Russian nationalist and herself a hawk, Mr. Prilepin was quoted as saying that the West had “habituated” Ukraine to such actions.
