Zakhar Prilepin wrote the first post on his channel since his car was blown up on May 6, 2023. In it, he said that on that day he himself was driving a car, and his bodyguard Alexander Shubin was in the passenger seat. Shubin died, it was previously reported that it was he who was driving.
Prilepin says that after the explosion that occurred under the wheel of the car, he “lost consciousness for about three minutes,” and then crawled out through the broken windshield. According to him, both of his legs are broken "and there's something else." He also confirmed that he kicked his daughter out of the car five minutes before the explosion.
In 2014, after the annexation of Crimea, Prilepin said that he had rethought his attitude towards the modern Russian government, declared a “personal truce” and the absence of “the slightest inducement to confrontation” to it. From 2016 to 2018, Prilepin took part in hostilities in eastern Ukraine. In February 2022, the European Union imposed personal sanctions against Prilepin, who previously signed a letter supporting the Russian invasion. In January 2023, Prilepin signed a contract with the Federal Service of National Guard Troops and went to war in Ukraine.
In 2019, Zakhar Prilepin said in an interview: “No matter what they say, I managed a combat unit that killed people. In large quantities. I know this well, and how can I deal with it later?.. These people just died, they just lie in the ground, they are simply killed. And there are many. It's just that not a single unit from the Donetsk battalions could compare with my battalion in terms of performance. Everything that we did was a goofy mess that we did. This makes me especially laugh in the context of attacks on me.
Prilepin's car was blown up on May 6 in the Bora region of the Nizhny Novgorod region. He was later taken to the hospital and put into a medically induced coma, from which he was taken out on May 7 after surgery.
On the day Prilepin's car was blown up, the police detained a certain Alexander Permyakov, who had two passports in his hands – Russian and Ukrainian. At the same time, a video was published where he said that he was born in Druzhkovka, Donetsk region, in 1993. In 2018, he was allegedly “recruited by the Ukrainian special services.” On their own instructions, he came to Russia in 2022 to “eliminate” Prilepin. Permyakov claimed that he used two anti-tank mines to blow up the writer's car. The man on camera said that he repented of his deed.
A representative of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in a commentary to Ukrayinska Pravda said that he could neither confirm nor deny the information about the involvement of the SBU in the explosion of Prilepin's car.
On May 7, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs released a video in which a police officer said that before being arrested, Permyakov told him that he was not involved in the assassination attempt and “had been catching partridges in the pond.”