Russia names Ukrainian suspect in blogger’s murder

Russia’s top security agency has charged a Ukrainian man with the bombings on Thursday. He killed a famous Russian military blogger Cafe in St. Petersburg.

Vladlen Tatarsky, 40, a staunch supporter of the war in Ukraine who regularly reported on the fighting on the front lines, was killed on April 2 while leading a conversation at a riverside cafe in Russia’s second capital, St. Petersburg. – The biggest city. More than 50 people were injured.

A 26-year-old resident of St. Petersburg, Daria TrepovaTatarsky was seen on video before the explosion presenting a statue containing explosives and was quickly arrested. Russian media reported that Trepova told investigators she did not know what was inside the statue despite being asked to hand it over to her.

Russian authorities are treating the bombing as terrorism and He blamed the Ukrainian intelligence agencies To set up. Ukrainian officials have not directly responded to the allegations, but an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the bombing as part of Russia’s internal turmoil.

On Thursday, the Federal Security Service, known by the Russian acronym FSB, said it collected information about the blogger, identified as Yuri Denisov, and that Trepova had delivered the explosives through the postal service. The agency said Denisov was working under the orders of Ukrainian security forces and had left Russia the day after the bombing.

The FSB also alleged that Trepova was a supporter of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and that Navalny’s top allies repeatedly called for subversive activities in Russia.

Navalny’s allies have previously denied similar charges and warned that authorities could use the blast to extend Navalny’s prison term and cast his supporters as “internal enemies”.

The bombing is the latest high-profile attack on a pro-war in Russia. Last year, a national TV commentator was killed by a bomb in her SUV outside Moscow.

Tatarsky was the pen name of Maxim Fomin, who amassed more than 560,000 followers on his Telegram messaging app channel. In the year He joined separatists in eastern Ukraine after the Moscow-backed rebel was unleashed in 2014 and became a blogger after years of fighting on the front lines.

Military bloggers have become increasingly visible in Russia, supporting the war but exposing flaws in military strategy, while the Kremlin has clamped down on free media and stifled any criticism of the war.