A pro-war Russian army blogger was killed in an explosion at a St. Petersburg café, the Russian Interior Ministry said.
Vladlen Tatarsky was killed and at least 30 other people were injured in the blast while arguing in the café on Sunday.
Tatarsky, whose real name is Maxim Fomin, had more than 560,000 followers on Telegram and was one of the most influential military bloggers who provided a common and occasionally critical observation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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There has been no confirmation of the identity of those guilty of the destruction of Street Food Bar No. 1 in the largest city in Russia at the moment.
A St. Petersburg said the coffee belonged to Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group, the personal army fighting for Russia in Ukraine.
A senior Russian official pointed the finger at Ukraine, offering no evidence. The request was rejected via Kiev.
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.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser, blamed Russian terrorism for the blast.
“Spiders eat others in a jar,” he added.
Russian media and army bloggers said Tatarsky met with members of the public and a woman handed him a statuette that allegedly exploded.
In videotaped comments, a witness said someone who knew herself as Nastya asked questions and exchanged comments with Tatarsky.
The witness, Alisa Smotrova, quoted Nastya as saying she had made a bust of the blogger but that guards had asked her to leave it at the door, suspecting it might be a bomb.
Nastya and Tatarsky joked and laughed. Then he went to the door, grabbed the bust and took it to Tatarsky.
He allegedly placed the bust on a nearby table and followed the explosion. Smotrova described other people running in terror, some wounded through glass shards and covered in blood.
“At this point nothing is certain”
If Tatarsky were an intentional target, it would be the assassination on Russian soil of a figure connected to the war in Ukraine.
Darya Dugina, the daughter of Vladimir Putin’s best friend, was killed last August after a suspected explosive device exploded in the Toyota Land Cruiser in which she was traveling.
Tatarsky among many participants in a lavish Kremlin rite last September to proclaim Russia’s annexation of 4 partially occupied regions of Ukraine.
“We will defeat Array, we will kill Array, we will steal, we need. Everything will be as we like,” he said in a video clip on the occasion.
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Military analyst Sean Bell told Sky News that it “seems really unlikely” that the Ukrainian army was the St. Petersburg attack because it was not an army target.
Other pro-war Russian bloggers paid tribute to Tatarsky.
“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.