Russian authorities have detained a woman in St Petersburg on suspicion of orchestrating an explosion in a café in the centre of the city that killed a prominent pro-war blogger.
Maxim Fomin, known publicly as Vladlen Tatarsky who was one of the most vocal supporters of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was killed on Sunday afternoon in a blast at the café where he was holding a meet-and-greet event with followers and fans.
The Russian state investigative committee said on Monday it had detained a 26-year-old woman named Darya Trepova on suspicion of being involved in his death.
Russia’s health ministry said 32 people were injured in the attack, and 10 were in serious condition. Its investigative committee has opened a criminal case into “murder by a publicly dangerous method”.
Local news reports said Tatarsky had been handed a statuette of himself, which may have been packed with explosives.
Security camera footage showed a woman in a long black coat carrying a large cardboard box to the venue. Another video, apparently recorded by someone in the audience, showed Tatarsky unpacking the gift in front of a room full of people, against the backdrop of a wall-sized promotional image of his face surrounded by a halo of assault rifles, bazookas and other weapons.
The interior ministry released a video of Trepova being questioned in detention. When asked if she understood why she had been detained, Trepova replied: “I would say it’s for my presence at the scene of the murder of Vladlen Tatarsky . . . I brought the statuette there that then exploded.”
Questioned as to who had given her the statuette, she asked if she could explain later.
Trepova was arrested in an apartment belonging to a friend of her husband’s, local news outlet Fontanka reported, adding that she had a flight booked to Uzbekistan.
According to human rights group OVD-Info data, Trepova, together with her husband Dmitry Rylov, had previously been detained during an anti-war protest rally.
Speaking from a location believed to be outside Russia, Rylov told reporters from SVTV News, that his wife had been set up. “Yes, Daria and I do not support the war, but we find such methods are unacceptable,” he said.
The café where the blast took place has links to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the boss of the Wagner mercenary group boss. The bar hosts a discussion group at weekends called “Cyber Front Z” — Z being a symbol of those supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“It’s true, I did give the café over to the patriotic movement Cyber Front Z, which held various seminars there,” Prigozhin said on Monday. He drew a parallel between Sunday’s incident and the killing of Daria Dugina, the daughter of a prominent pro-Kremlin nationalist ideologue, in an explosion last year.
“Everything is similar. But I wouldn’t blame the Kyiv regime for these actions. I think a group of radicals is involved that is unlikely to have any connections to the government,” Prigozhin said in a statement to several Russian news outlets.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed Russia’s National Antiterrorism Committee had evidence that the Ukrainian special services may have been involved in planning what the NAC said was a terrorist attack.
The NAC said agents from Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, had been involved. Navalny, who is serving nine years in a maximum-security prison after being convicted of fraud, is Russian president Vladimir Putin’s most prominent political opponent.
On Monday, Ivan Zhdanov, chief of the Navalny foundation, wrote on his Telegram channel: “The situation is pretty idiotic: denying our involvement is idiocy. Of course, we do not do such things.”
He said the authorities had been trying to “frame terrorism offences” against the foundation for a long time.
Tatarsky, who has more than half a million followers on his Telegram channel, is one of the most prominent pro-Kremlin “military correspondents” and a native of Makiivka in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. He had fought on the side of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic as well as for units of the Luhansk People’s Republic.
Last year, his popularity soared after his video from a ceremony at the Kremlin celebrating the annexation of Ukraine’s occupied regions went viral. It showed Tatarsky saying: “We’ll defeat everyone. We’ll kill everyone. We’ll rob everyone we need to. Everything will be as we like it.”
Other Russian propagandists have called for a response. “What now? Will we forget? Will we forgive?” RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan wrote on her Telegram channel.
Referring to the attack, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday: “I don’t think about what is happening in St. Petersburg or Moscow. Russia should think about this. I am thinking about our country.”
Additional reporting by Roman Olearchyk in Kyiv
