A pro-Russian military blogger was killed in a bomb attack on a cafe in St. Petersburg

A well-known pro-Russian military blogger was killed and another 25 people were injured this Sunday in an explosion in a cafeteria in St. Petersburg (Russia) that would belong to a restaurant entrepreneur and head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhinaccording to the local newspaper fountain. “The strength of the explosive device was more than 200 grams of TNT (trinitrotoluene)»a source of the body and security forces told the official TASS agency.

The governor of St. Petersburg, Aleksandr Beglov, explained that there were at least 25 injured, 19 of whom were hospitalized. The Ministry of the Interior, for its part, confirmed that the person who died was the well-known war reporter Vladlen Tatarski. Russian authorities have opened criminal proceedings for “murder in a generally dangerous manner,” according to Efe.

According to fountainat the bar Cyber​​​​Front Z rallies, believed to be linked to Prigogina, are often held on weekends and which, according to the Institute for Strategic Studies (ISD), is a troll factory used to promote Russian propaganda on social media.

According to the Russian media Readovka, Vladlen Tatarsky is the one who was killed in this explosion pic.twitter.com/oeBVTTPL8r

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The St. Petersburg newspaper said that, according to a post on VKontakte, Russia’s Facebook, one of those events took place this Sunday with Tatarsky at the address where the cafeteria is located. “It is known that the cafe used to belong to Yevgeny Prigozhin”he wrote on his Telegram channel.

According to Fontanka, referring to the witnesses of the explosion, one of the guests – supposedly a woman – brought the war reporter a figurine with an explosive that exploded. The official agency RÍA Nóvosti confirms that the gift was inspected before it was delivered to the military blogger, who knew the woman because she had given him postcards on several occasions at similar events.

As the independent newspaper Meduza reports, Tatarski is a blogger and one of the most famous military correspondents, who gained fame during the Russian military campaign in Ukraine. He was born in the Donetsk region of Ukraine and fought in 2014 in the self-proclaimed People’s Republic. He had more than 560,000 subscribers on his Telegram channel.

The attack on the pro-Russian military blogger is reminiscent of the one that killed Darya Dugin, the daughter of the leader of the Neo-Eurasian Movement Alexander Dugin, who is considered close to the Kremlin, in August. A Russian journalist was killed when a bomb exploded under her vehicle while she was driving on a road on the outskirts of Moscow. Russian authorities have accused Ukrainian secret services of being behind the attack, which the government in Kiev has vehemently denied.