The shooting of Tatarsky’s cafe in Kiev, Ukraine, as reported by the Russian media and state news agencies: A “theoretical investigation of a black hole in Ukraine”
Twenty-five other people were injured in the blast, 19 of whom were hospitalized, the city’s governor said. State media reported that investigators were questioning everyone who was in the cafe.
Russian media and military bloggers said Tatarsky was meeting with members of the public when a woman presented him with a box containing a bust of him that apparently blew up. A patriotic Russian group that organized the event said it had taken security precautions but acknowledged that those measures “proved insufficient.”
The agency said investigators and forensic specialists were on the scene. All the circumstances and details of the crime committed are being established,” it said.
A Telegram user with more than half a million followers, Tatarsky was pro-war but he was critical of Russians’ setbacks in Ukraine.
According to Russian state news agency Vesti, Tatarsky named his Telegram channel after the character in Victor Pelevin’s novel “Generation “P”. He wrote several books after that.
An explosion tore through a cafe in St. Petersburg, killing a prominent military blogger and strident supporter of the war in Ukraine
He told CNN in May last year that he still believed Russia would accomplish its goals in Ukraine, even though he was not critical of the overall operation.
St. Petersburg’s prosecutor Viktor Melnik traveled to the scene to coordinate the actions of emergency services and law enforcement agencies, TASS reported. The governor of St. Petersburg, Alexander Beglov, was overseeing the coordination of the work of the special services and the provision of assistance to the victims of the explosion, TASS said.
An explosion tore through a cafe in Russia’s second-largest city Sunday, killing a well-known military blogger and strident supporter of the war in Ukraine. There was a rumour that a bomb was carved into a bust of the man who gave it to him.
Russian officials said Vladlen Tatarsky was killed as he was leading a discussion at the cafe on the bank of the Neva River in the historic heart of St. Petersburg. Some 30 people were wounded in the blast, Russia’s Health Ministry reported.
A witness has said that a woman wearing a clothes asked questions and spoke to the other person.
The witness, Alisa Smotrova, quoted Nastya as saying she had made a bust of the blogger but that guards asked her to leave it at the door, suspecting it could be a bomb. Two people laughed and joked. She then went to the door, grabbed the bust and presented it to Tatarsky.
A cafe is shown in a video posted to Russian messaging app channels. Tables and chairs were broken and stained by blood, and shards of glass littered the floor.
Russia’s Interfax news agency reported that a St. Petersburg woman, Darya Tryopova, was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the bombing. She had been previously taken into custody for taking part in anti-war rallies.
According to Russian media, investigators are looking at the bust as the possible source of the blast but they are not ruling out that there was an bomb in the cafe before the event.
Military commentators and patriotic commentators pointed a finger at Ukraine and compared the bombing to the killing of Darya Dugina, a nationalist TV commentator. She was killed when a remotely-controlled explosion blew up her SUV as she was driving near Moscow.
The father of Dugina’s was a nationalist philosopher and political theorist who supports the invasion of Ukraine and praised the hero Tatarsky as an “immortal” hero.
Crime and Terror in Ukraine: The Beginning of the Cold War and its Implications for the United Nations, Russia, and for the Security of the State
Ukrainian authorities have not claimed responsibility for numerous fires, explosions and apparent assassinations in Russia since the beginning of the fighting. At the same time, officials in Kyiv have jubilantly greeted such events and insisted on Ukraine’s right to launch attacks in Russia.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser wrote that Spiders are eating each other in a jar. “Question of when domestic terrorism would become an instrument of internal political fight was a matter of time.”
After the Kremlin’s annexation of four regions of Ukraine last year that most of the world rejected as illegal, Tatarsky posted a video in which he vowed: “That’s it. We are going to win, kill, and rob everybody we can. It will be how we like it. God be with you.”
The public’s access to information and the jailing of critics has been limited by the Kremlin, at the same time it has stifled alternative voices opposing the war.