A car explosion in southern Moscow on Friday severely injured a former adviser to Mykola Azarov, the pro-Russian Ukrainian prime minister who fled to Russia in 2014 — the second car bombing in Russia in two days.

Sergei Zavorotnyi, 72, was driving on Kirovogradskaya Street when the device went off. He was taken to a Moscow hospital, the Investigative Committee of Russia for the city of Moscow said, CNN reported. Video from the scene shows a dark grey SUV heavily damaged with its windows blown out.

The committee said a comprehensive investigation is under way. It did not identify any suspects, Al Jazeera reported, pending a criminal inquiry.

How the attack was carried out

An explosive device was planted under the car and detonated remotely as Zavorotnyi was driving, Al Jazeera’s Yulia Shapovalova reported from Moscow. “The investigative committee has already launched a criminal case into this explosion,” she said.

Russia’s REN TV channel said Zavorotnyi lost his left arm, suffered multiple other injuries and was in a coma after the blast. That account is attributed to a single Russian broadcaster and has not been confirmed by the Investigative Committee, which said only that he was hospitalised.

Who he is

Azarov was prime minister from 2010 to 2014 under Moscow-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych, who was forced from office by the Maidan protests and fled to Russia in February 2014. Azarov also lives in Russia.

Before becoming Azarov’s adviser, Zavorotnyi worked as a journalist for the Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda. He wrote a book about Yanukovych’s removal and ran an online outlet critical of the Ukrainian authorities.

Azarov told Russian state television he was “shocked” by the attack, which he said left his former adviser critically injured, and that he believes Zavorotnyi was targeted because of his criticism of the Ukrainian government. That is the view of an associate of the victim, not a finding by investigators.

The St Petersburg bombing

A day earlier, on Thursday, a military serviceman was killed by a bomb in his vehicle in St Petersburg, according to Russia’s Investigative Committee, which did not identify the victim or say who might be responsible.

Accounts of the victim’s rank diverge. The Fontanka news outlet described him as a colonel, and other Russian online media as a senior air force officer; Shapovalova said preliminary reports indicated he was a military serviceman rather than a colonel of the Russian Air Force. No official confirmation of rank has been reported, and this desk does not adopt any of the three versions.

In both cases the device was planted under the car and triggered remotely, Shapovalova said.

Attribution

“Here in Russia, all the attacks are considered to be orchestrated by the Ukrainian side,” Shapovalova reported. Russia has blamed Ukraine for earlier assassinations of military figures. Ukrainian authorities have not commented on either bombing.

No evidence attributing either attack has been made public, and no claim of responsibility has been reported.

The diplomatic backdrop

The explosions come during a fresh push to end the war. US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff met both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia’s Vladimir Putin this week, and said European delegates would join the next round of talks. The pair flew to Moscow after trilateral US–Russia–Ukraine talks in Abu Dhabi ended without a clear breakthrough.

“Both sides have now agreed to expand the next round of negotiations to include our European partners,” Kushner said after meeting Putin. CNN records no connection between the talks and the bombings, and none should be inferred.

Notes on the reporting

The name and the role vary between outlets. CNN writes Sergey Zavorotny; Al Jazeera uses Sergei Zavorotny in its photo caption and Zavorotnyi in its text. Al Jazeera’s caption also calls him Azarov’s former spokesman while its body text, and CNN, call him an adviser. The transliterations are of the same name and the same man.

Hiru News carried the story in Sinhala, crediting CNN at the foot of its filing. It is therefore a translation of one of the sources above rather than independent corroboration: the credibility badge on this page counts verified domains, and two of the three accounts here ultimately trace to CNN’s reporting. Al Jazeera’s account, filed with AP and with its own correspondent in Moscow, is the genuinely separate one.

CNN marks its account a developing story.

Not reported

No source gives Zavorotnyi’s current condition from a medical authority, names anyone under investigation, or says whether either victim had reported threats. Neither account says whether the two bombings are being investigated as linked.