Russian police arrest woman over bombing that killed pro-war blogger

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Russian police have arrested a woman suspected of delivering a bomb that killed a prominent pro-war Russian military blogger in a blast in a cafe in central St Petersburg on Sunday.

Russian authorities say Vladlen Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin, was killed by a bomb blast as he was hosting a discussion with other pro-war commentators at a cafe on the banks of the Neva River in the historic heart of St Petersburg.

Russian news reports said the bomb was hidden in a bust of the blogger that the suspect had given to him as a gift moments before the explosion, which also wounded more than 30 people. On Russian media a video was circulating that appeared to show Tatarsky, microphone in hand, being presented with a statue of a helmeted soldier. It said the explosion happened minutes later.

Russian police said they had identified a woman called Darya Trepova as the suspect, adding that she was arrested in an apartment in St Petersburg following a search on Monday morning. Sources in the country’s interior ministry told the RBK news outlet that the attack was “carefully planned in advance by several people”.

Tatarsky, who had more than 560,000 followers on Telegram, was one of the country’s most influential military bloggers. He 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, and frequently travelled with Russian troops on the frontlines. In one instance he called for a tribunal for the Russian military leadership, describing Moscow’s top officers as “untrained idiots”.

He was also 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.

It was not immediately clear who was behind the explosion.

The Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, appeared to blame 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.

But the head of the Wagner paramilitary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said in an audio message that he would “not blame the Kyiv regime” for it. “I think it is the work of a group of radicals not linked to a government,” he said in a statement. Prigozhin added that the cafe where the incident occurred previously belonged to him.

A top Ukrainian government official said the explosion that killed Tatarsky was part of an internal struggle. “Spiders are eating each other in a jar,” the 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’s death is 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.