Russian opposition activist Ilya Ponomaryov gave details of the assassination attempt

The Russian authorities have been trying to annoy me for a long time. One (clearly non-system) assassination attempt was back in 2016, attempted unsuccessfully by a Chechen hitman, who was then under-shot by Amina Okuyeva. Three more serious ones were carried out after February 2022," Ponomarev writes. They did not work out, but led to the fact that I have a very serious security. To get close to my house in Kiev because of this is very difficult. So the enemy decided to take an unconventional way.

Ponomarev tells about the events of the night of 31 July:

I was still sulking on my fb page, I woke up at 3am because the air defence cannonade against the drones started. At 3:15 there was a loud explosion, one of the drones (from the sound it was clear that it was a Shahed-136, aka Geran-2, 40kg of explosives) right in front of the house fell into the water. It is unclear where it flew to. Closer to 4 a.m., two drones flying from the north-east direction were also hit, fell and exploded (one on the ground, the other detonated against a tree crown), one 50 metres and the other about 100 metres from the house. There was already quite serious damage from them - several windows were blown out.

Despite this, Ponomarev and his guards assessed the damage, ordered new windows and went to work.

On the one hand, I didn't believe in a personal attack, and there was a reasonable explanation that a whole group of drones could well have been launched at a single target, their air defence could have shot them down at about a single point above our house, so they fell in one place. It was disconcerting, of course, that there were three of them all in one place, which is very untypical - but not impossible.

The next night, however, the attack was repeated.

I woke up again shortly before the explosion - this infernal machine makes noise like a faulty moped. But this time much louder, from the same direction as yesterday, and - the main difference - there was no air defence (then it turned out that the air alert had been cancelled a few minutes before). The thing exploded really hard, right in front of my doorstep, and a bunch of shrapnel flew at me. The fire was quickly put out by the guards who came running in, but there was a lot of blood and it came to a quick, quick trip to the hospital.

Thanks to the quick reaction of doctors, Ponomarev survived.

A huge thank you to the doctors (I certainly admire how Ukrainian medicine works now, especially for military injuries). So I'm now looking scared, angry, sitting in my office and comforting all my friends who call me all the time.

Ponomarev ends his message on an optimistic note:

It's a good thing we didn't have time to get GLONASS up to speed in our time. I think its error saved me. It was not four steps to death, but literally five metres. Now our task is to make them regret this blunder. Efforts on the front, on the partisans, and on sanctions are not twice, but ten times as much. My ear is still intact, so there is room to strive. And yes, who's reading me there - I won't be in the house for the rest of the war, so I'll be recognised if you leave it alone.

Ilya Ponomarev considers today as his "second birthday".