A well-known pro-Russian military blogger was killed and 25 others injured in an explosion at a coffee shop in St. Petersburg on Sunday.Russia, which would have belonged to the businessman and head of the Wagner Group, Yevgueni Prigozhin. “The force of the explosive device was more than 200 grams of TNT (trinitrotoluene)”a source in the security forces told the official TASS agency.
The same source assured that the explosion was caused by “an improvised bomb inside a statue that was given to Tatarski as a gift.” Russian media reported that the main suspect in the attack was the woman who gave the statuette to Vladen Tatarski, a well-known 40-year-old Russian nationalist blogger and war correspondent.
Tatarski was born in the Donetsk region of Ukraine and fought in 2014 in the self-proclaimed people’s republic. He had more than 560 thousand subscribers on his Telegram channel. Russian authorities opened a criminal case for “murder in a generally dangerous manner.”
The attack on the pro-Russian military blogger is reminiscent of the one who killed Daria Dugina, daughter of the leader of the Neo-Euroasianist Movement, Alexandr Dugin, considered close to the Kremlin, in August. The Russian journalist died when a bomb exploded under her vehicle when she was driving on a road on the outskirts of Moscow. The Russian authorities accused the Ukrainian secret services of being behind the attack, an accusation rejected by the kyiv government.