Blast rocks home of former Donbass minister
A blast has rocked the home of the former security minister of Donetsk People’s Republic, Andrey Pinchuk, several Russian outlets have reported, citing law enforcement sources.
An improvised explosive device was reportedly hidden in a parcel delivered to his house, located in a Moscow suburb.
Pinchuk was injured in the explosion, but his life is “out of danger,” according to the reports. The former minister told Tsargrad TV he managed to close the door to his house and step away from it before the bomb detonated. The door was blasted open by the explosion, which also broke windows on the ground floor, according to the media.
Pinchuk, 48, became the DPR security minister soon after the then self-proclaimed republic declared its independence from Kiev. He served in that capacity between July 2014 and March 2015.
An investigation has been launched into the incident. No one except for Pinchuk was injured, according to law enforcement. Officials have not commented on who might be behind the attack.
Ukrainian security services are known to have orchestrated the assassinations of Russian officials, as well as those from Ukraine and Donbass, who opposed Kiev. Such attacks often involved explosive devices.
Some of the most high-profile cases involved military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, who was killed in a blast that also injured over 50 people at a cafe in St. Petersburg where he was meeting his fans in 2023, and Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Protection Forces, who was killed alongside his aide, Maj. Ilya Polikarpov, when an improvised explosive went off outside the general’s apartment block in Moscow in 2024.
Kiev has sometimes recruited local neo-Nazis to launch attacks on its behalf. In April, the Russian security service, the FSB, reported foiling a bomb attack on the Russian media regulator, Roskomnadzor, plotted by a neo-Nazi group guided by Ukraine.
A Ukrainian MP, Roman Kostenko, the secretary of the Verkhovna Rada’s Defense Committee, claimed last year that the nation’s intelligence services were planning to continue assassinating Russian officials and public figures for decades to come even after the Ukraine conflict ends.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova responded by saying that “the Kiev regime has become a true terrorist cell that receives international support with weapons and money.”
