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, as authorities blamed Ukraine for the attack.
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.
Police said they had identified a woman called Darya Trepova as the suspect and that she was arrested in an apartment in St Petersburg after a search on Monday morning. Authorities said she was a supporter of the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
In a statement, Russia’s national antiterrorism committee claimed the attack was “planned by the special services of Ukraine with the involvement of agents from those who had cooperated with the so-called Navalny Anti-Corruption Fund [Foundation]”.
Sources in the country’s interior ministry told the RBK news outlet that the attack was “carefully planned in advance by several people”.
Trepova had apparently spoken with Tatarsky before the explosion, the Associated Press reported. One witness said the woman told Tatarsky she had made a bust of the blogger but guards asked her to leave it at the door, suspecting it could be a bomb, the agency reported. They joked and laughed, and then she went to the door, grabbed the bust and presented it to Tatarsky, according to the AP report.
One Ukrainian official has suggested the attack was planned internally in a dispute between pro-Kremlin groups. Russian news reports said Trepova had said she had been “used”.
Ukrainian intelligence sources indicated that they believed the bombing was the work of Russian partisans, and that they understood the bomb was contained not in the statue but in the pulpit, meaning the woman arrested was not involved.
The sources said the attack was part of a new strategy by the small resistance movement to target Russian propagandists, considered softer targets, and St Petersburg was also targeted because it had recently been twinned with the captured Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
The blast that ripped through Street Food Bar No 1, which sits in sight of historic landmarks and has ties to the Vladimir Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, stunned Russia’s second largest city on Sunday. Whoever ultimately stands behind the attack, it is the latest reminder of how the violence unleashed by Russia in Ukraine has increased the dangers in its own cities as well.
Russian news reports said the bomb was hidden in a bust of the blogger that the suspect had given to Tatarsky as a gift moments before the explosion, which also wounded more than 30 people. A video was circulating on Russian media that appeared to show Tatarsky, microphone in hand, being presented with a statue of a helmeted soldier. It said the explosion happened minutes later.
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 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.
In an interrogation published by Russian police, Trepova said she understood she had been arrested for delivering the statue that had later exploded, but declined to say who had given it to her. “Can I tell you later?” she said as the video cut off.
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 Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner paramilitary group, said in an audio message 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 bombing 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.”
Prigozhin has been involved in a series of high-profile disputes, including with the Russian defence ministry. He has openly criticised top generals and the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, for his conduct of the war and accused them of diverting ammunition and other aid from his soldiers.
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.
Additional reporting by Dan Sabbagh in Kyiv