An explosion at a cafe in St. Petersberg has killed one person and injured 25 more. The victim has been identified as a Russian military blogger who supported President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russian news reports said Vladlen Tatarsky was killed in the explosion at the Street Food Bar No. 1 cafe on Sunday during an event organised by Russian patriarchs. He was a guest speaker when the bomb went off.
The reports did not mention any claim of responsibility, but the Russian Interior Ministry has said that everyone at the establishment at the time of the blast was being “checked for involvement.”
According to Russian media and other military bloggers, a woman presented him with a box containing a statuette that apparently exploded. The organisers of the event are calling it a “terrorist attack”.
Last August, Darya Dugina, a 29-year-old commentator for a nationalist Russian TV channel, died when a remotely controlled explosive device planted in her SUV blew up as she was driving on the outskirts of Moscow. She and her father — a philosopher, writer and political theorist — strongly supported Putin’s decision to send troops into Ukraine.
Russian authorities blamed Ukraine for the attack, but Kyiv denied involvement.
Tatarsky had reported from the Ukrainian frontline and gained particular notoriety last year after posting a video filmed inside the Kremlin in which he said “We will defeat everyone, we will kill everyone, we will rob everyone as necessary. Just as we like it.”
He had more than 500,000 followers on Telegram.
Wagner group cafe
The cafe targeted on Sunday was previously owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s notorious Wagner mercenary group, a St Petersburg news site reported.
A group called Cyber Front Z, calling itself “Russia’s information troops” on Telegram, said it had hired out the cafe for the evening.
“There was a terrorist attack. We took certain security measures but unfortunately, they were not enough,” it posted on the social media platform.