Vladlen Tatarsky, with 560,000 followers on social networks, has been one of the most influential personalities during the conflict
The well-known Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky has died this Sunday in the bomb explosion in a cafeteria in Saint Petersburg, in the that 16 people had been injured.
Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin, had more than 560,000 followers on Telegram and was one of the most prominent of the influential military bloggers who have provided often critical commentary on Russia’s war in Ukraine.
He was one of hundreds of attendees at a lavish ceremony held in the Kremlin last September to proclaim Russia’s annexation of four partially occupied regions of Ukraine, a move that most countries condemned at the UN as illegal. “We will defeat everyone, we will kill everyone, we will rob everyone that is necessary. Everything will be as we like,” he was seen saying in a video clip on that occasion.
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According to a St. Petersburg website, the blast on Sunday took place in a cafeteria that once belonged to Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner private army, which is fighting for Russia in Ukraine. There were no indications of who was behind the explosion. If Tatarsky was deliberately targeted, it would be the ssecond assassination on Russian soil of a high-level figure related to the war in Ukraine.
Last August, the Russian Federal Security Service accused the Ukrainian secret services of murdering Darya Dugina, daughter of an ultranationalista, in a car bomb attack near Moscow that President Vladimir Putin described as “diabolical”. Ukraine denied its involvement