A prominent pro-war Russian military blogger has been killed in a blast in a cafe in central St Petersburg, Russia’s interior ministry said in a statement.
Vladlen Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin, had more than 560,000 followers on Telegram and was one of the country’s most influential military bloggers.
More than 30 people were wounded in the blast on Sunday, Russia’s health ministry reported. Citing sources in the country’s security agencies, the RIA news outlet said a bomb was hidden in a statue presented to Tatarsky in a box as a gift during a public meeting. Russia’s state investigative committee said it had opened a murder investigation.
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 statue of a helmeted soldier. It said the explosion happened minutes later. Videos posted on social media show the explosion and injured people on the street.
A patriotic Russian group that organised the event said it had taken security precautions but acknowledged that those measures “proved insufficient”.
Russia’s Interfax news agency reported that a St Petersburg woman was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the bombing. It said that she had been previously detained for taking part in anti-war rallies.
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova blamed Ukraine, saying Tatarsky’s activities “have won him the hatred of the Kyiv regime” and that he and other Russian military bloggers had long faced Ukrainian threats. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner group whose mercenaries are fighting in Ukraine, said on Sunday he would “not blame the Kyiv regime” for it but a “group of radicals” instead.
A top Ukrainian government official cast the explosion that killed Tatarsky as part of internal turmoil. “Spiders are eating each other in a jar,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted. “Question of when domestic terrorism would become an instrument of internal political fight was a matter of time.”
Tatarsky was among the attendees at a Kremlin ceremony last September where Vladimir Putin proclaimed Russia’s annexation of four partly occupied regions of Ukraine, a move widely condemned by the international community.
“We’ll conquer everyone, we’ll kill everyone, we’ll loot whoever we need to, and everything will be just as we like it,” Tatarsky said in a video message recorded at the ceremony.
The blogger, who frequently travelled with Russian troops on the frontlines, emerged as one of the loudest critics of Russia’s defence ministry over the last year for its inability to achieve military gains in Ukraine.
In one instance he called for a tribunal for the Russian military leadership, describing Moscow’s top officers as “untrained idiots”.
Tatarsky was one of the leading voices in the pro-war blogger community. The bloggers, who are frequently former veterans with contacts on the frontlines, often provide a rare insight into Russia’s real performance on the ground and are allowed a surprising amount of leeway to criticise the conduct of the war – although they rarely criticise Putin. In a sign of their growing importance, the Russian president last year established a taskforce to coordinate work between the government and the bloggers.
If Tatarsky was deliberately targeted, his death will be the second killing on Russian territory of a prominent pro-war figure.
Last August, Darya Dugina, the daughter of an ultra-nationalist Russian ideologue, was killed when a bomb blew up the Toyota Land Cruiser she was driving. Russia has accused Ukraine’s intelligence services of carrying out the killing but Ukraine denies involvement.
