One of Russia’s most influential pro-Kremlin war bloggers, Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed in an explosion at a restaurant in St Petersburg on Sunday.
The incident happened around 6 pm local time, in the center located on Universitetskaya Embankment, according to the ministry of internal affairs, which confirmed the death of Tatarsky.
St Petersburg governor Alexander Beglov said 25 people were injured, 19 of whom were hospitalized. Russia’s state investigative committee has opened a criminal case of “killing by a dangerous public method”.
Tatarsky, whose real name is Maxim Fomin and has more than 560,000 subscribers on his Telegram channel, met with supporters and subscribers of the restaurant.
According to local news outlet Fontanka, an unidentified woman handed Tatarsky a statue of himself, possibly packed with explosives, which exploded about five minutes later. The Ren-TV channel posted a video showing Tatarsky taking the figurine out of a bag and watching it, a film allegedly shot by a social media user directly before the explosion. .
The area has alleged links to Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mercenary group.
Fontanka reported that Prigozhin owned two different cafés at the same location as the restaurant where the explosion occurred. The bar located there now hosts a weekend discussion club called “Cyberfront Z” – Z is the symbol of those who support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Tatarsky is one of the most prominent pro-Kremlin “military correspondents” and is a native of Makiivka in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. He fought on the side of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic as well as units of the Luhansk People’s Republic.
Last year, his popularity rose after his video from a Kremlin ceremony celebrating the annexation of Ukraine’s occupied regions went viral. It shows Tatarsky, saying: “We will defeat everyone. We will kill everyone. We will steal everything we need. Everything will be as we want. ”
The Kremlin has yet to respond to the incident, but some Russian propagandists are calling for an answer “What now? Shall we forget? Shall we forgive?” RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan wrote on her Telegram channel.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, linked the incident to Russia’s “internal political struggle.” “Spiders eat each other in a jar,” he wrote in a post on Twitter.
Tatarsky’s death follows the killing last August of Darya Dugina, the daughter of a prominent ultranationalist ideologue, in a car bomb near Moscow. Russia blamed the attack on Ukraine’s secret services, which denied involvement.
