Prominent Russian army blogger Vladlen Tatarsky was killed Sunday by a bomb blast at a St. Petersburg café in what appeared to be the moment of the murder on Russian soil of a figure strongly linked to the war in Ukraine.
Russia’s state commission of inquiry said it had opened a homicide investigation. State news firm RIA said another 25 people were injured and 19 of them were being treated at the hospital.
A senior Russian official pointed the finger at Ukraine, offering no evidence. A Ukrainian presidential adviser said “domestic terrorism” is erupting in Russia.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry made no accusations of involvement in the attack, but said the silence in Western capitals was hypocritical in the face of journalists’ expressions of concern.
Tatarsky, whose real name is Maxim Fomin, had more than 560,000 fans on Telegram and was one of the most prominent military bloggers who defended Russia’s war effort in Ukraine while criticizing the military’s top military brass.
“We will defeat everyone, we will kill everyone, we will steal from everyone we need. Everything will be as we want,” he said in a video last September at a Kremlin rite in which President Vladimir Putin claimed 4 occupied regions of Ukraine. As Russian territory, a move rejected as illegal by most countries.
News firm TASS quoted an unnamed source as saying the bomb was hidden in a miniature statue that he passed to Tatarsky while he was on his way to an organization of other people at the café.
Mash, a Telegram channel with links to Russian law enforcement, posted a video that appeared to show Tatarsky, microphone in hand, being presented with a statuette of a helmeted soldier. He said the explosion occurred minutes later.
Denis Pushilin, the Moscow-based leader of the Russian-occupied component of Ukraine’s Donetsk province, has publicly stated that Ukraine is to blame.
“He was killed ignoblely. Terrorists can do nothing else. The Kiev regime is a terrorist regime. It will have to be destroyed, there is no other way around it,” he said.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the lack of reaction in Washington, London and Paris “speaks for itself given their apparent fear for the welfare of journalists and freedom of expression. “
“The reaction in Kiev is surprising, where those who get Western subsidies do not hide their joy at what happened,” he wrote on the ministry’s website.
‘MATURE ABCESS’
Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser, wrote on Twitter that it was only a matter of time, “like the bursting of a mature abscess,” before Russia fed itself through what it called domestic terrorism.
“The spiders themselves in a jar,” he said.
Tatarsky’s death follows the killing last August of Darya Dugina, the daughter of a prominent ultranationalist, in a car bombing near Moscow.
Russia’s Federal Security Service accused Ukrainian intelligence of carrying out the attack, which Putin called “evil. “Ukraine has denied any involvement.
Russian war bloggers, a collection of army correspondents and independent army commentators, have enjoyed ample freedom from the Kremlin to publish hard-hitting reviews of the war, now in its 14th month. Putin even appointed one of them as a member of his human rights council last year.
They reacted with surprise to the news of Tatarsky’s death.
“He was in the most popular posts of the army’s special operation and came out alive. But the war discovered him in a café in Petersburg,” said Semyon Pegov, who blogs under the name War Gonzo.
Alexander Khodakovsky, a pro-Moscow figure from eastern Ukraine, wrote: “Max, if you were nothing, you would have died of ‘vodka and colds. ‘But you hurt them, you did what no one else could do. We will pray for you, my brother.
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