Today, Russian investigators are desperately searching for two women suspected of involvement in the assassination of a propagandist of Vladimir Putin in a St. Petersburg café.
Vladin Tatarsky, whose real name is Maxim Fomin, was blown to pieces yesterday after a woman said to be Daria Trepova, 26, entered a cafe and handed him a statuette of himself reportedly laden with explosives.
The 40-year-old Tatarsky, a staunch supporter of Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, was speaking at a political event at the Street Food No 1 café when the bomb exploded next to him, killing the promoter and wounding 32 others.
Now, police are looking for two female suspects – Trepova and Maria Yaran, 20, who some reports say are in a St Petersburg hospital after the blast.
Investigators have put Trepova on Russia’s most wanted list on suspicion of killing Tatarsky after she fled the scene. A video is believed to show her walking to a café carrying a box containing what may be the statuette said to contain 450 grams of TNT.
Today, Russian investigators are desperately searching for two women suspected of involvement in the assassination of a propagandist of Vladimir Putin in a St. Petersburg café.
Now, police are looking for two female suspects – Trepova and Maria Yaran, 20, who some reports say are in a St Petersburg hospital after the blast.
Vladin Tatarsky, whose real name is Maxim Fomin, was blown to pieces yesterday after a woman said to be Daria Trepova, 26, entered a cafe and handed him a statuette of himself reportedly laden with explosives.
Russian investigators are searching the café where a pro-Kremlin blogger who called for the destruction of Ukraine was “assassinated” and 30 others wounded in a bomb attack.
Photos from inside the café appear to show Trepova handing Tatarsky his bus before starting to return to her seat.
A witness claimed, “Tatarsky stopped her and told her to sit next to him,” adding that she was shy and did not want to sit near her.
Trepova and her boyfriend, Dmitry Rylov – also in his 20s and a member of the so-called Russian Liberation Army – had previously been arrested at anti-war rallies in Russia.
Trepova had picked up a flight ticket from St. Petersburg’s Pulkova Airport last night after the explosion, but did not show up, reports Izvestia.
The direction of the flight was not reported but there were suggestions that it was intended to reach Georgia via Turkey.
Investigators searched Trepova’s apartment but could not find her, while her mother was reportedly taken from the house and taken to a police station.
A report by the Telegram channel VCK-OGPU claimed that it had access to Trepova’s private web exchanges with a friend in a confidential web chat.
This indicates that she came to St. Petersburg from Moscow late last week and intends to travel abroad – to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, via Istanbul.
Trepova, a former shop worker in St. Petersburg, reportedly had breakfast with her friend yesterday.
After the explosion, Trepova reportedly sent a message to her friend to say, “I could have died there, I’d rather die there, I’ve been set.”
Well-known Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky (pictured) was killed by a bomb in a cafe in St Petersburg on Sunday.
The moment of the explosion, which killed the chief war blogger in the Kremlin, Vladlen Tatarsky, and injured dozens of people
The head of the Wagner company, Yevgeny Prigozhin, admitted that he owned the coffee shop where the explosion killed Tatarsky.
“I actually passed the café over to a national movement called Cyber Front Z,” he said. They were holding various seminars there.
It is already similar to the murder of Daria Duzhina (the daughter of a Putin ideologist who was killed at 29 in a car explosion last year). I will not blame the Kiev regime for this.
I think a group of (Ukrainian) right-wing extremists did it, which is very unlikely to be government related.
“The explosion occurred at a height of 60 centimeters from the ground,” police told RBC media.
Its capacity was from 300 to 450 grams of TNT.
“The explosion was to the right of Tatarsky.”
One report said that security at the café—where Tatarskin was attending a seminar—stopped Trepova from bringing the statuette to the meeting because he feared it might be explosive.
A witness said: ‘The girl who brought the statue was sitting a little further from me, and when she started talking about all this, she said they wouldn’t let her in at the entrance.
She said they said “there could be a bomb.”
She said exactly that. I (Tatarsky) literally asked permission: “Allow me to bring her anyway?”
“Bring it in… and we’ll check if there’s anything in there,” says Vladlin.
Those were his words.
Video shows Tatarsky vowing to destroy Ukraine.
He said: “We will conquer all, and we will kill all.”
“We will loot whoever we need, and everything will be as we like.”
Some Russian outlets immediately blamed the Ukrainian authorities for the explosion, but it is not yet clear if this was the case.
Valentina Matvienko, the pro-Putin Russian Senate speaker, said: “Vladlin wrote the truth, he wrote simply and brilliantly.
As a result, it has become a target for our enemies who fear the strength of our spirit and the will of our people.
And Vladlin not only fought in the militia, collecting aid for our soldiers, but most importantly, he formed people’s understanding of the special operation.
“And I’m sure he did a lot for our victory in the future.”
