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Russian authorities have opened a homicide probe after Sunday’s explosion at a bar in St. Petersburg, Russia, that killed famed “military blogger” Vladlen Tatarsky, a pro-Putin propagandist and a strong supporter of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The explosion killed Tatarsky, pseudonym of Maksim Fomin, at Street Food Bar # 1, an establishment in central St. Petersburg where an event in his honor was being held at the time organized by members of the pro-Russian Telegram channel “Cyber Front Z ”. About thirty people were injured: there were around a hundred in all at the event.
The Russian news agency Interfax wrote that a young woman, Darya Tryopova, who had previously been arrested for participating in anti-war rallies in Ukraine, was arrested on Sunday. It is still not entirely clear how things went, but the most probable hypothesis is that the explosion that killed Tatarsky was caused by a bomb contained in a statuette (the bust of a soldier, perhaps depicting Tatarsky himself) which it had been handed to him at the event.
Videos posted on Telegram by people who were there show Tatarsky with the statuette, presumably shortly before the explosion.
Other videos posted online, the veracity of which is very difficult to confirm, show a young woman entering the venue holding the box containing the statue. According to some witnesses, the woman introduced herself as Nastya (a diminutive of Anastasia) and she said she was a sculptor who wanted to give Tatarsky a gift, but that her security did not allow her to bring the statue inside the room her. Tatarsky at that point would have made her carry the statue inside her, and would have opened it in the presence of everyone. The explosion would have occurred shortly after.
Mash has released CCTV footage showing a woman entering the cafe with a box that presumably contains the bomb (hidden inside a statue she gifted to Tatarsky). There are some photos from inside the cafe too. pic.twitter.com/VpRUsec4YE
— Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock) April 2, 2023
If these hypotheses are confirmed, it can be said that the explosion was a deliberate and well-designed attack aimed at killing Tatarsky.
Tatarsky had about 560,000 followers on his Telegram channel and was one of the so-called “military bloggers”, also known as “milbloggers”, i.e. pro-Putinian propagandists who spread information and comments in favor of Russian military intervention in Ukraine on Telegram. Tatarsky had been to eastern Ukraine several times following the Russian army and held very hard and extremist positions: he had gone so far as to argue that anyone wearing a Ukrainian army uniform should be killed, and that the government of Ukraine should be eliminated. He also justified and supported the Bucha massacre, in which the Russian army killed over 400 Ukrainian civilians.
Russian authorities have already begun to blame the assassination on Ukrainian intelligence. It is a possible hypothesis, also because it would be the second time that a nationalist propagandist has been killed in an attack in Russia since the beginning of the war: in August 2022 a car bomb killed Darya Dugina, the daughter of the famous far-right propagandist Alexander Dugin . The Ukrainian government then denied any connection to the attack, but was denied months later by US intelligence, which said that the attack was ordered by Ukraine and strongly criticized the operation.
Even in the case of Tatarsky, the Ukrainian government has denied responsibility: Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, he wrote on Twitter that “snakes are eating each other” and spoke of “domestic terrorism”.
The room after the explosion (EPA/ICRF Press Service / Handout)
Come he wrote are Republic Daniele Raineri, then there are two other possibilities as to the responsibility for the attack: one is that it is an attack by the internal Russian resistance, that is, by Russian people opposed to the regime of Vladimir Putin and to the war. Finally, there is the possibility that Tatarsky was killed by internal rivals: for months now Tatarsky – like all milbloggers – had been extremely critical of the progress of the war, and had argued that it was necessary to dismantle the entire military command.
Tatarsky was also very close to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group who was also one of the former owners of Street Food Bar #1. Prigozhin has been taking highly critical positions against the Russian Defense Ministry for months, in an attempt to increase his political influence.