Car Bomb Near Yekaterinburg Wounds Drone Factory Owner
Vladimir Tkachuk, founder of the sanctioned drone factory Uraldronzavod, was severely wounded when an explosive device under his Mercedes went off in a village near Yekaterinburg, killing his driver.
An explosive device planted under a car went off late Tuesday evening, August 4, in the village of Bolshoy Istok outside Yekaterinburg, severely wounding Vladimir Tkachuk, founder and director of the drone factory Uraldronzavod, while his driver was killed on the spot. The story is not as distant from Belgrade as it might seem: Uraldronzavod sits on the sanctions lists of the United States and the European Union, and Serbia has not adopted those measures, so any mention of Russia’s military industry under a restrictive regime revives the question of alignment with the EU’s common foreign and security policy, a question the European Commission measures in every annual progress report.
Witnesses described a powerful blast and flames engulfing Tkachuk’s Mercedes to local media. The vehicle was destroyed. The explosion happened Tuesday evening, but details only reached the public the next day, once Russian media reported them.
Reports on Tkachuk’s condition diverge, and that discrepancy alone says something about how carefully information is being rationed here. His Telegram channel described the attack as an assassination attempt and said the wounded man was in intensive care, in stable condition. Sources at the Russian state news agency TASS claimed the opposite, that his condition was critical and doctors were fighting for his life.
Investigators have opened a murder inquiry, but there have been no public statements. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.
A sanctioned company and the Upir drone
Tkachuk founded Uraldronzavod in 2023, part of a wave of private drone makers that sprang up after the invasion of Ukraine began. The factory builds the Upir, Russian for specter, a cheap and simple FPV drone the Russian army uses in large numbers at the front. That production is exactly why the company ended up under sanctions from Washington and Brussels.
Tkachuk was no anonymous entrepreneur from the Urals. He was previously filmed showing his factory’s drones to President Vladimir Putin at a military drone exhibition in Saint Petersburg. He also runs the pro war Telegram channel Povernutiye na Voyne, translated as Obsessed with War, which has more than 650,000 followers. The combination of front line production and his own media platform made him a more visible figure than most executives in Russia’s defense industry.
A second attack within a week
The attack near Yekaterinburg is the second of its kind in seven days. On Saturday, August 1, an explosion at a restaurant on Kudrinskaya Square in Moscow killed five people and wounded nineteen. The venue is known as a spot frequented by state officials, and Russian media claimed the target was General Alexander Chaiko, appointed in May to command Russia’s Aerospace Forces, who was marking his birthday and a promotion at the restaurant that evening. Russian officials and Moscow’s mayor blamed Ukraine for the attack.
No one has claimed responsibility for the Moscow explosion either.
Why are business owners increasingly becoming targets?
Because the war economy has moved from state combines into private plants. The wave of assassinations inside Russia since 2022 has mostly targeted people in uniform or behind a microphone: Darya Dugina died in a car bombing near Moscow in August 2022, military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky was killed by an explosive device in a Saint Petersburg cafe in April 2023, and General Igor Kirillov was killed by a bomb planted on a scooter outside a building in Moscow in December 2024.
Tkachuk belongs to a different category. He is a civilian who runs a private company supplying consumables for the front, and dozens of such firms have been founded in Russia over the past three years. If the target keeps shifting toward them, the circle of people considered legitimate targets grows far wider, and physical security for such plants and their owners becomes far more expensive.
For the region, that shift carries one practical consequence. The debate over sanctions on Russia’s defense industry has so far been treated as a legal and trade matter, about lists, licenses and end users. Attacks on the executives of firms on those same lists turn it into a security question, and states that have not adopted the sanctions, Serbia among them, will have to answer for that in a different tone than before.
The next deadline is already known: the European Commission’s annual report on Serbia, where the degree of alignment with EU measures is expressed as a percentage and published for all to see.
