One person died and at least 16 people were injured in an explosion at a café in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Sunday. The Russian news agencies RIA and TASS report this on the basis of emergency services. It would be a well-known Russian military blogger, Vladlen Tatarsky. The Russian Ministry of the Interior confirmed his death on Sunday evening.
Known as a pro-Kremlin blogger, Tatarsky wrote extensively about the war in Ukraine, often from the front lines. Last year, he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. On Telegram, Tatarsky, whose real name is Maksim Fomin, had over 560,000 followers. He previously fought in eastern Ukraine alongside separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk. He was serving a prison sentence for armed robbery.
Tatarsky was to hold an event for other media professionals at the site of the attack, where he would talk about what it means to be a military correspondent, among other things. A woman is said to have handed him a statuette that turned out to contain explosives. The search for the woman in question has now been launched by the authorities. According to a police source, TASS reports, the force with which the explosive went off more than 200 grams of TNT. According to local media, the cafe where the explosion took place previously belonged to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Russian mercenary army Wagner.