According to the Russian government, an infamous pro-Russian combatant turned propagandist known as Vladlen Tatarsky was killed in a St. Petersburg cafe on Sunday in an explosion that injured at least 25 others.
Tatarsky was seen inspecting a miner statuette on a cellphone just before the explosion. Tatarsky used to be a miner, and his Ukrainian hometown is known for its coal mining and heavy industry. "What a lovely man," Tatarsky exclaimed as he examined the statue, before joking, "I'm much prettier!"
The explosives hidden inside the bust detonated moments later, killing Tatarsky instantly.
Attendees who survived the explosion claimed Tatarsky was given the statue by a woman. An explosion ripped through the cafe five minutes after the statue was handed over to Tatarsky. Darya Trepova, a 26-year-old St. Petersburg resident who had previously been arrested for participating in antiwar rallies in February 2022, was detained as a suspect in the attack, according to Russian media.
Tatarsky, real name Maxim Fomin, is from Marinka, a city in eastern Ukraine that was previously under Soviet control. He was imprisoned as a convicted bank robber in 2014, but he escaped as Russian-backed forces seized the region. He joined the military of the Luhansk People's Republic, a Moscow-backed puppet government in Eastern Ukraine, before becoming an influential military blogger with nearly 560,000 Telegram followers. Tatarsky was frequently photographed armed, in full combat gear, and wearing Russian military identification during his frequent forays into Ukraine, despite his blogging career.
Tatarsky was best known outside of Russia for his extreme rhetoric, in which he referred to Ukrainians as "brain-damaged Russians," advocated for increased attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, and celebrated the massacre of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha. "We'll conquer everyone, kill everyone, and loot whoever we need to," Tatarsky said in a recording made after attending a speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin last October.
Tatarsky was speaking to an ultranationalist trolling group called Cyberfront Z in a cafe called Street Food Bar No. 1 in St. Petersburg's Vasileostrovsky district on Sunday. Both the venue and the Cyberfront Z group are linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch who provides mercenaries to Moscow for its wars.
Prigozhin admitted earlier this year to journalists that he had "held a meeting with a group of patriotic bloggers and offered them all possible help" in order to push pro-Russian propaganda on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. According to Prigozhin, the group declined financial assistance but accepted his offer to base themselves in office space owned by the catering magnate turned warlord.
Some observers speculated that the explosion was caused by a schism between the Wagner mercenaries and the Russian defense ministry. Tatarsky was a vocal opponent of the Russian military leadership's handling of the war. After a Ukrainian artillery strike killed hundreds of Russian troops in January, he called for a military tribunal for Russia's top generals, whom he called "untrained idiots."
Dmitry Kiselyov, a pro-Kremlin commentator on Russian state television, called the bombing a "brutal act of terror," adding that the "style and target obviously points to the Ukro-Nazis," a derogatory reference to the Ukrainian government. After losing one of their own, another Russian military blogger called for strikes on "decisionmaking centers in Kyiv."
The Ukrainian government has denied any involvement. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, suggested that the blast was the result of infighting among the Russian elite.
"In a jar, spiders are eating each other," Podolyak explained.
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