Russia accused Ukraine and a group linked to anti-Kremlin opposition leader Alexey Navalny of plotting a bomb explosion in a St. Petersburg cafe that killed a pro-war military blogger.
Law enforcement agents in the city detained a female suspect, Darya Trepova, on suspicion of involvement on Monday. Russia’s National Antiterrorism Committee blamed Ukrainian security services for the blast together with “persons cooperating with the so-called Navalny Anti-Corruption Fund of which the detained Trepova is an active supporter,” in a statement on its website.
Sunday’s explosion killed Maxim Fomin, whose Telegram channel under the pseudonym Vladlen Tatarsky had more than 570,000 followers, and injured 32 other people, Russian state media reported. He had become widely known since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February last year, advocating strongly for goals that included the complete destruction of the Ukrainian state.
Navalny, who survived a poisoning in August 2020 that he and Western governments blamed on the Kremlin, is serving a 9-year sentence after being convicted of fraud and contempt of court. Russia outlawed his Anti-Corruption Foundation, which had published high-profile exposes of alleged official graft, as “extremist” in 2021 as part of a sweeping Kremlin crackdown on Putin’s critics, forcing many to flee abroad to avoid imprisonment.
Tatarsky, 40, was killed by an improvised explosive device containing the equivalent of more than 200 grams of TNT that was hidden inside a statuette presented to him at an event at the cafe, the state-run Tass news service reported, citing an unidentified law enforcement official.
Trepova admitted bringing the figurine to the cafe, the Interfax news service cited the Interior Ministry as saying.
“This is a terrorist act,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Monday, according to Tass, adding that President Vladimir Putin had been “immediately” informed of the incident.
Tatarsky was among those present at a Kremlin ceremony in September when Putin announced Russia was annexing four Ukrainian regions, even as it didn’t full control them. Ukraine has vowed to reclaim the territory.
“We will defeat everyone, we will kill everyone, we will rob everyone who needs to be robbed,” the blogger said in a video from the ceremony. “Everything will be the way we like it.”
His death follows the killing last August in a car bombing of 29-year-old Darya Dugina, whose father Alexander is a prominent Moscow nationalist who advocates a “Russian World” ideology to justify expansion by the Kremlin. Russia accused Ukraine of responsibility, which the government in Kyiv denied.
U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that elements of the Ukrainian government authorized the car bombing in Moscow, the New York Times and CNN reported in October, citing unidentified American officials. The U.S. was unaware of the plot beforehand, they said.
Dugin on Sunday posted a photo of his daughter and Tatarsky on his Telegram channel, praising the dead blogger as a “Russian saint.”
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