One of Russia’s most influential pro-Kremlin war bloggers, Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed in a blast at a restaurant in St Petersburg on Sunday.
The incident took place at around 6pm local time, in the centrally located Universitetskaya Embankment, according to the ministry of internal affairs, which confirmed Tatarsky’s death.
St Petersburg governor Alexander Beglov said that 25 people had been injured, with 19 of them hospitalised. Russia’s state investigative committee has opened a criminal case of “murder by a publicly dangerous method”.
Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin and who has more than 560,000 subscribers to his Telegram channel, was meeting supporters and subscribers in the restaurant.
According to local news outlet Fontanka, an unknown woman handed Tatarsky a statuette of himself, possibly stuffed with explosives, that exploded about five minutes later. The Ren-TV channel posted a video showing Tatarsky taking the figurine out of a bag and looking at it, film allegedly shot by a social media user directly before the explosion.
The venue has alleged links to Wagner mercenary group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Fontanka reported that Prigozhin had owned two different cafés in the same location as the restaurant where the explosion took place. The bar located there now hosts a discussion club at weekends called “Cyberfront Z” — Z being a symbol of those supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Tatarsky 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 increased after his video from a ceremony at the Kremlin celebrating the annexation of Ukraine’s occupied regions went viral. Tatarsky was shown in it, saying: “We’ll defeat everyone. We’ll kill everyone. We’ll rob everyone we need to. Everything will be as we like it.”
The Kremlin has yet to react to the incident, but 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.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, linked the incident to Russia’s “internal political struggle”. “Spiders eat each other in a jar,” he wrote in a Twitter post.
Tatarsky’s death follows the killing in August last year 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.