One person was killed and six injured in an explosion at a cafe in Saint Petersburg on Sunday, the TASS news agency reported, citing emergency services. The Russian media point out that it is an attack.
The explosion took place during an event attended by pro-Russian Donbas military blogger Maksim Fomin, also known as Vladlen Tatarsky. According to the Telegram channel Dva Mayora, the blogger has died. More than a dozen people were injured. The place is a regular meeting point for Russian nationalists.
Russian state broadcaster Vesti reported that the bomb was planted in a statuette given to Tatarsky by a young woman during the event at the bar.
It is the second murder of a Russian nationalist in Russia since the Ukrainian war began. Last August analyst Daria Dugina, daughter of prominent Russian nationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, was killed.
The Russian government then blamed the Ukrainian secret services. Ukraine denied its involvement. If Tatarsky has been a deliberate target, it would be the second assassination on Russian soil of a high profile associated with the war in Ukraine. The explosion took place in a cafe that once belonged to Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner private army, the mercenaries who fight on the side of Russia in Ukraine. Prigozhin has been meant during these months as the executor of the Russian advance in Bakhmut.
Tatarsky was a radical nationalist blogger and ardent supporter of the invasion of Ukraine and the killing of Ukrainians. Focused on the military theme, he had traveled to the front several times. Always faithful to his bellicose tone, he called for rocket attacks against power plants in Ukraine, but also to go further: "We must destroy the infrastructure, then the hospitals will not work and more Ukrainians will die," he proclaimed in a video shared on his channel. , where he spoke openly about the abuses of the Russian army.
Vladlen Tatarsky was born in Makiivka, in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, in 1982. But he usually referred to Ukrainians with the racist term 'jojli.' "Many people have a strange love for Ukrainians, they wonder why we attacked those 'jojli', [but] those pigs were already angry before, we have to attack their infrastructure," he said on his channel.
His closeness to the Russian government was such that he was one of hundreds of attendees at the pompous ceremony held in the Kremlin last September to proclaim Russia's annexation of four partially occupied regions of Ukraine, a theft of territories most of countries at the UN condemned it as illegal. "We are going to defeat everyone, we are going to kill everyone, we are going to steal everyone we need. Everything is going to be very good," he said in a video clip recorded from his mobile as he left the historic event, chaired by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
Tatarsky had more than 560,000 followers on Telegram and was considered one of the most influential military bloggers. He sometimes made critical comments about the performance of the Russian forces in the Ukraine.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
