Zakhar Prilepin, the Russian writer and supporter of the attack on Ukraine who was injured Saturday in Russia when his car exploded and killed his assistant, said today that he will not be afraid.

“Thank you to everyone who prayed, because it would be impossible to survive such an explosion,” Prilepin said on Telegram, adding: “I tell the demons, you will not intimidate anyone. God exists. We will win.”

The 47-year-old nationalist writer paid tribute to Alexander Shubin’s driver who was killed in the explosion. “My dearest friend, my protector of eight years, is dead,” he added.

Zakhar Prilepin, who came out of an induced coma on Sunday, said he was driving the car and had left his daughter “five minutes before the explosion”. A mine exploded under the steering wheel on the passenger side, where Sasha Shubin’s driver, “his guardian angel for eight years,” was sitting, he said.

“I passed out for about three minutes, woke up and crawled on the broken windshield,” he said. “The villagers ran and helped me out.” Prilepin said both of his legs were broken and one fracture was open. He said Nizhny Novgorod regional governor Gleb Nikitin sent a helicopter to fly him to the city in 16 minutes, a distance that took him three hours to drive.

Russia yesterday accused Ukraine’s Western “protectors”, primarily the United States, of sharing responsibility for “terrorist attacks” perpetrated on its territory, which Moscow said were carried out by Kiev, following the bomb attack on in which Zakhar Prilepin was seriously injured and his driver was killed.

A staunch supporter of the military attack on Ukraine in which he said he took part, a successful author whose books have been translated in the West, who later became an advocate of an ultra-nationalist line, Prilepin was seriously injured in the explosion that essentially destroyed his car on Saturday , near Nizhny Novgorod, Russia’s third largest city, 400 kilometers east of Moscow.