The novelist and politician has been sanctioned by European nations for his fervent support of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Zakhar Prilepin, who was injured in car explosion in Russia that killed his driver, he is the third prominent pro-war figure to be targeted by a bomb since Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The 47-year-old novelist was hospitalized with injuries to both legs on Saturday but was conscious and “fine”, state news agency TASS reported, citing officials.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry accused Ukraine and backing Western states, particularly the United States, of the attack on the writer. However, a senior kyiv official accused Moscow of staging the incident.
Prilepin, the author of several novels inspired by his experiences of war and living in Russia’s provinces, was once praised by Western literary critics before putting his pen and gun at the service of the Kremlin in Ukraine.
Born in 1975 in the Ryazan region, Prilepin was sent to fight in Russia’s wars against Chechen separatists in the 1990s.
After his return to civilian life, he recounted the horrors of war in his first novel “Pathologies,” which describes the actions of a special forces unit, including excessive drinking and murder.
He went on to write five more novels and is also the author of numerous poems, essays, and articles. His works have been translated in Western Europe and he has received several state prizes.
As Prilepin was trying to make a name for himself in Europe’s literary world in the 2000s, he became an opposition activist, criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin and campaigning for Russia’s poor against corrupt oligarchs.
Everything changed with the annexation of Crimea to Ukraine by Russia in 2014.
Since then, Prilepin has embraced Putin’s policies and fought alongside pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, revealing in 2017 that he had created his own battalion.
“I think a writer has the right to any position,” Prilepin told a news conference in Moscow after the disclosure.
“You can stand with a flag that says peace to the world or you can take up arms.”
In a 2019 YouTube interview, he bragged that his unit had “killed a large number of people.”
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Prilepin, who has some 300,000 subscribers to his Telegram and YouTube channels, became an ardent supporter of the military campaign.
“I am not to blame for what is happening. It has happened, now we have to carry it out, ”he said in November.
Prilepin has also been politically active as co-chairman of the “A Just Russia – For Truth” party.
Last year, he took a leading role in creating GRAD, a parliamentary group that seeks to identify cultural figures with “anti-Russian” views and persuade state and business to stop funding them.
GRAD stands for “Group for Investigating Anti-Russian Activity in the Cultural Sphere.” Grad is also the Russian word for “hail” and the name of a missile system.
Prilepin has been sanctioned by Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the European Union for his support for the war in Ukraine.
The writer and politician has been compared to two giants of Russian literature, Leo Tolstoy and Mikhail Lermontov, who fought as soldiers before turning to writing.
According to Prilepin, Tolstoy and Lermontov would have joined the Russian army in the Ukraine if they had been alive today.
Interviewed by the AFP news agency in Paris in 2018, he said he was fighting for “empathy” and made no secret of his desire for Russia to take over more of Ukraine’s territory.
“Our goal is to conquer and control the territory,” he said.
“Killing is not a goal in itself and we will be responsible in hell.”