Explosion in a St Petersburg cafe kills Vladlen Tatarsky, an influential blogger with 560,000 Telegram followers, Russian news agencies say.
Well-known Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky has been killed in a blast in a cafe in St Petersburg, according to Russian news agencies, quoting sources as saying it was caused by an explosive device.
Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin, had more than 560,000 followers on Telegram and was one of the most prominent of the influential military bloggers who have provided an often critical running commentary on Russia’s war in Ukraine.
He was among hundreds of attendees at a lavish Kremlin ceremony last September to proclaim Russia’s annexation of four partly occupied regions of Ukraine, a move that most countries at the United Nations condemned as illegal.
A St Petersburg website said the explosion took place at a cafe that had at one time belonged to Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group of mercenaries fighting for Russia in Ukraine.
Russia’s state Investigative Committee said 19 other people were wounded in the blast, and it had opened a murder investigation. There was no indication of who was responsible.
Interfax news agency quoted the interior ministry as saying: “One person was killed in the incident. He was military correspondent Vladlen Tatarsky.”
Al Jazeera’s Dorsa Jabbari reporting from Moscow said there were at least 100 people in and around the cafe for the event organised by the “Cyber Front Z Movement”, where Tatarsky was speaking.
TASS news agency quoted an unnamed source as saying the improvised explosive device was hidden in a miniature statue that was handed to Tatarsky as he addressed a group of people in the cafe.
Mash, a Telegram channel with links to Russian law enforcement, posted a video that appeared to show Tatarsky, microphone in hand, being presented with a statuette of a helmeted soldier. It said the explosion happened minutes later.
Tatarsky had championed Russia’s war effort in Ukraine while often criticising the failures of the army top brass.
“We’ll defeat everyone, we’ll kill everyone, we’ll rob everyone we need to. Everything will be as we like it,” he was shown saying in a video clip last September at a Kremlin ceremony.
If Tatarsky was deliberately targeted, it would be the second assassination on Russian soil of a figure associated with the war in Ukraine.
Russia’s Federal Security Service accused Ukraine’s secret services last August of killing Darya Dugina, the daughter of an ultra-nationalist, in a car bomb attack near Moscow that President Vladimir Putin called “evil”. Ukraine denied involvement.
Russia’s war bloggers, an assortment of military correspondents and freelance commentators with army backgrounds, have enjoyed broad freedom from the Kremlin to publish hard-hitting views on the war, now in its 14th month. Putin even made one of them a member of his human rights council last year.
They reacted with shock to the news of Tatarsky’s death.
“He was in the hottest spots of the special military operation and he always came out alive. But the war found him in a Petersburg cafe,” said Semyon Pegov, who blogs under the name War Gonzo.
Alexander Khodakovsky, a leading pro-Moscow figure in eastern Ukraine, wrote: “Max, if you were a nobody, you’d have died of ‘vodka and headcolds’. But you were dangerous to them, you did your business like no one else could. We will pray for you, brother.”
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