Explosion in Russian cafe kills prominent military blogger
An explosion tore through a cafe in Russia’s second-largest city Sunday, killing a well-known military blogger and strident supporter of the war on Ukraine. Some reports said a bomb was embedded in a bust of the blogger that was given to him as a gift.
Russian officials said Vladlen Tatarsky was killed as he was leading a discussion at the cafe on the banks of the Neva River in the historic heart of St. Petersburg. Some 30 people were wounded in the blast, Russia’s Health Ministry reported.
Russian media and military bloggers said Tatarsky was meeting with members of the public when a woman presented him with a box containing the bust that apparently blew up. A Russian patriot group that organized the event said it had taken security precautions but acknowledged that the measures “proved insufficient.”
In remarks recorded on video, a witness said a woman who identified herself as Nastya exchanged remarks with Tatarsky during the discussion.
The witness, Alisa Smotrova, quoted Nastya as saying she had made a bust of the blogger, but guards had asked her to leave it at the door, suspecting it could be a bomb. Nastya and Tatarsky laughed. She then went to the door, grabbed the bust and presented it to him. He reportedly put the bust on a table; the explosion followed. Smotrova described people running in panic, some injured by shattered glass and covered in blood.
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Russia’s Interfax news agency reported that a St. Petersburg woman, Darya Tryopova, was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the bombing. Interfax said she had been detained before for taking part in anti-war rallies.
A video posted on Russian messaging apps showed the cafe after the explosion. Tables and chairs were broken and stained by blood, and shards of glass littered the floor.
Russian media said investigators were looking at the bust as the possible source of the blast but have not ruled out the possibility that an explosive device was planted in the cafe before the event.
No one has claimed responsibility, but military bloggers and patriotic commentators pointed a finger at Ukraine and compared the bombing to the killing last August of Darya Dugina, a nationalist TV commentator. She was killed when a remotely controlled explosive device that had been planted in her SUV blew up as she was driving on the outskirts of Moscow. Russian authorities blamed Ukraine’s military intelligence for Dugina’s death, but Kyiv denied involvement.
Reacting to the latest incident, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Tatarsky’s activities “have won him the hatred of the Kyiv regime” and noted that he and other Russian military bloggers have faced Ukrainian threats.
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Since the fighting began Feb. 24, 2022, Ukrainian authorities have refrained from claiming responsibility for various fires, explosions and apparent assassinations in Russia. At the same time, officials in Kyiv have jubilantly greeted such events and insisted on Ukraine’s right to launch attacks in Russia.
A top Ukrainian government official cast Sunday’s explosion as internal turmoil, suggesting that Russian opposition to the war was behind the blast.
“Spiders are eating each other in a jar,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential advisor, tweeted in English. “Question of when domestic terrorism would become an instrument of internal political fight was a matter of time.”
Tatarsky was the pen name for Maxim Fomin, who had filed regular reports from Ukraine since the start of the war. Tatarsky had accumulated more than 560,000 followers on his Telegram channel.
Born in the Donbas, Ukraine’s industrial heartland, Tatarsky worked as a coal miner before starting a furniture business. When he ran into financial difficulties, he robbed a bank and was sentenced to prison. He fled from custody after a Russia-backed separatist rebellion engulfed the Donbas in 2014, weeks after Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. Then he joined separatist rebels and fought on the front line before turning to blogging.
He was known for his blustery pronouncements and ardent pro-war rhetoric.
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After the Kremlin’s supposed annexation of four regions of Ukraine, declared last year by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Tatarsky posted a video in which he vowed, “That’s it. We’ll defeat everybody, kill everybody, rob everybody we need to. It will all be the way we like it. God be with you.”
Military bloggers have played a prominent and influential role in the flow of information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They have almost universally championed the goals of the campaign but at times criticize Russian military strategy and tactical decisions.
At the same time, the Kremlin has squelched voices opposing the war by shutting down news outlets, limiting the public’s access to information and jailing critics.
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