By Julian Roepcke
The power struggle within the Russian leadership is escalating and is increasingly turning into open violence.
One dead and 32 injured, according to the bomb attack on Sunday afternoon in a café in the heart of the Russian Baltic Sea metropolis of Saint Petersburg.
The dead man: none other than Maxim Fomin, known under the pseudonym Vladlen Tatarski. He was a friend and house propagandist of Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the 50,000-strong mercenary army “Wagner”, which causes fear and terror in eastern Ukraine, among other places.
According to the Russian authorities, “agents connected to the Anti-Corruption Fund”, an organization of the imprisoned Putin adversary Alexei Navalny, “supported by the Ukrainian secret service” committed the bombing.
A 26-year-old peace activist was arrested on Monday, who – of course – immediately confessed in front of the cameras that she was responsible for the assassination of the ultra-nationalist and warmonger Tatarski.
Navalny’s team immediately described the unsubstantiated allegations as brazen lies. The Russian domestic secret service FSB “eliminated” Tatarsky itself. The agents “poison and kill each other, divide their territories,” said one of Navalny’s senior associates. Regarding the Russians’ claim, it said: “They need not only the external absolute enemy in the form of Ukraine, but also an internal enemy in the form of the Navalny team.”
The fairy tale of the Russian “anti-terrorist agency” does not even believe the former Putin chef and now powerful warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin himself. “I would not blame the Kiev regime for these actions,” Prigozhin wrote on Telegram.
So who is behind the crime? Experts believe the attack was perpetrated by the Putin regime – and say the cracks in the Russian leadership are becoming more and more apparent!
The cafe in Saint Petersburg just after the explosion Photo: picture alliance/dpa/TASS | Alexander Demianchuk
Russia expert Sarah Hurst, editor of the weekly newsletter The Russia Report, to BILD: “As in the case of the murder of the ultra-nationalist Darya Dugina (in August 2022 near Moscow, ed.), it is possible that the Russian secret service FSB staged all this for its own purposes. Either to get rid of someone who had become uncomfortable, or to send the message that all Russians are in danger, or both.”
Background: Like his friend and mentor Prigozhin, Tatarasky was a self-confessed critic of Russia’s hesitant approach to Ukraine. Both have repeatedly criticized the Russian chief of staff and even the Russian defense minister. However, they did not dare to criticize the Kremlin dictator Vladimir Putin (70).
Russia expert Hurst warned BILD: “The café where Tatarsky was killed previously belonged to Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has recently fallen out of favor with the Kremlin for not conquering Bakhmut and, from the point of view of some powerful people in Moscow generally misbehaved.”
Historian Jan Behrends from the Viadrina European University in Frankfurt (Oder) has a gloomy prognosis for Russia. The country is “always a dangerous place”, the “crime and murder rates are higher than in Europe”.
Now, however, the situation has changed: “In addition to criminality, there is now harsh repression and the transition to civil war.”
The long-standing Eastern Europe expert told BILD: “Many armed forces are operating in Putin’s Russia, and an underground struggle for power is already raging. Repression and violence are becoming part of everyday life.”
For the British journalist and Russia expert living in Kiev
Putin is “a dictator, but also something like a mafia boss” who acts as a kind of “referee” when his gangster bosses have problems with each other. “It works well as long as the leader is strong, but when it’s weakened, people feel safer to act on their own.”
MacDonald’s prediction: “I think if the war continues to go badly for Putin and he gets even weaker, we’re going to see more and more open violence between the various competing factions under him. They fight for positions for the day when the dictator is gone. They know he is nearing the end of his power and if, say, Russia lost control of Crimea, he would be finished.”