Prosecutors asked a military court in Moscow on September 27 to sentence a man suspected of attempted murder of pro-Kremlin writer and political activist Zakhar Prilepin to life in prison.
Prosecutor Nadezhda Tikhonova also requested from the Second Western Military District Court that Aleksandr Permyakov pay a fine of 1.5 million rubles ($16,230).
Both Prilepin and Permyakov refused to take part in closing arguments.
Permyakov is a native of Ukraine's eastern region of Donetsk, parts of which have been occupied by Russian armed forces. It is not known how he pleaded.
Prilepin was wounded in a car bombing in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod on May 6 last year.
Prilepin’s driver, Aleksandr Shubin, died in the explosion, while Prilepin sustained unspecified injuries.
The Interior Ministry later said its officers detained Permyakov, stating the man confessed to the attack and was hired by Ukraine's intelligence.
Meanwhile, Russian media reports said Permyakov had previously fought alongside Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk against Ukrainian armed forces.
Once a left-wing dissident, Prilepin has become one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's most outspoken supporters on the right and a backer of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It was not the first attack against prominent pro-Kremlin figures since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In August 2022, a car bombing on the outskirts of Moscow killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of prominent Kremlin-connected far-right ideologue Aleksandr Dugin. Russian authorities alleged Ukraine was behind the blast.
In April 2023, an explosion at a cafe in St. Petersburg killed a popular military blogger, Vladlen Tatarsky. Officials once again blamed Ukrainian intelligence agencies for orchestrating it.
Prilepin became a Putin supporter in 2014, after Moscow illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. He was involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine on the side of Russian-backed separatists. In 2022, he was sanctioned by the European Union for his support of Russia's full-scale aggression against Ukraine.
In 2020, Prilepin founded a political party, For the Truth, which Russian media reported was backed by the Kremlin. A year later, Prilepin's party merged with the nationalist A Just Russia party that has seats in the parliament.
A co-chairman of the newly formed party, Prilepin won a seat in the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, in the 2021 election, but gave it up.
The Security Service of Ukraine told Ukrainian media at the time that it could not confirm or deny involvement in the attack or other incidents inside of Russia.