Europe1 .fr 15:22, 03 April 2023

The suspected bomb explosion in a café in St. Petersburg in northwestern Russia killed at least one person, Vladlen Tatarskii, a well-known Russian military blogger. On Monday, Moscow accused Ukraine and opposition leader Alexei Navalny of orchestrating the attack. A young woman was arrested.

Moscow on Monday accused Ukraine, with the complicity of supporters of imprisoned Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, of orchestrating the attack in which was killed the day before in St. Petersburg a famous blogger supporter of Russia's offensive against its neighbor. Investigators also announced the arrest of a young woman, Daria Trepova, a Russian national presented as an activist of Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Fund, banned in Russia since 2021.

"A terrorist act" denounced by the Kremlin

Police later released a video in which the 26-year-old admitted to bringing a booby-trapped statuette whose explosion killed blogger Maxim Fomin, known as Vladlen Tatarskii. She refuses to say for the moment where the bomb came from and does not say a word about Alexei Navalny's organization. The opponent, imprisoned for more than two years, is serving a nine-year prison sentence for fraud and is also facing charges of extremism.

The attack "was planned by Ukraine's secret service, which recruited agents from among those collaborating with Navalny's alleged Anti-Corruption Fund," Russia's counterterrorism committee said Monday. Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman denounced "an act of terrorism".

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The day before, an official of the Ukrainian presidency, Mykhailo Podoliak had denied on Twitter any involvement, considering that it was "domestic terrorism" due to rivalries within the Russian regime.

After the accusations against Alexei Navalny's organization, his spokeswoman, Kira Iarmych, denounced a frame-up by the Kremlin. "Alexei will soon be tried for extremism, he faces 35 years. And the Kremlin thought: it's great for the future to be able to add 'terrorism'," she wrote on Twitter.

Wagner

Russia is ruthlessly cracking down on critics of its government, especially those who criticize the military intervention in Ukraine. The young woman arrested on Monday, according to the state news agency Tass, was known to the justice system for having been imprisoned for ten days after demonstrating against the Russian offensive.

On Sunday, the blogger was killed in a café in St. Petersburg where he was speaking at a conference of an organization called "Cyber Z Front" favorable to the operation of Russian forces in Ukraine.

According to a latest assessment, 32 other people were injured, eight of whom are in serious condition. The explosion was equivalent to 200 grams of TNT. The café belonged to the leader of the Wagner paramilitary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The latter stressed Monday morning on Telegram that he had entrusted the establishment in question to the "Cyber Z Front".

The attack is reminiscent of the one in which Darya Dugina, an ardent defender of the offensive against Ukraine and daughter of ultranationalist author Alexander Dugin, perished last August. Russia then accused Kiev despite its denials.

Killing "everyone"

Taking the opposite view of the authorities, Yevgeny Prigozhin seemed to exclude that these assassinations were prepared by the Ukrainian secret services. "I will not accuse the Kiev regime of these acts. I think a group of radicals is in action," he told his press service's Telegram channel.

The night before, he had paid tribute to the blogger in an apparently filmed video from the city of Bakhmut, the epicenter of fighting in eastern Ukraine. The 40-year-old blogger killed on Sunday was from Donbass, an eastern Ukrainian region at the heart of the conflict.

Vladlen Tatarskii, who was regularly on the Russian front, had more than half a million subscribers on his Telegram channel. According to Russian media, he was jailed in Ukraine for a robbery in 2011. In 2014, taking advantage of clashes unleashed in eastern Ukraine by Moscow-led separatists, he escaped from prison to join these fighters.

In 2019, he left separatist forces, according to the daily Kommersant, to make a name for himself as a blogger. Last September, he shocked during a reception in the Kremlin celebrating the unilateral annexation of Ukrainian regions. We will defeat everyone, we will kill everyone, we will rob all the people we need, everything will be as we like," he told the camera.