Maksim Fomin, a Russian military blogger known as Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed yesterday when a bomb exploded in a cafe in St. Petersburg, Russia, in what appeared to be one of the most high-profile attacks on a supporter of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Tatarsky was giving a public talk when the explosion ripped through a cafe, the Russian authorities said. Videos posted on social media show him receiving a small statue in his likeness onstage shortly before the explosion.
According to NYT, No fewer than 25 other people were injured in the blast, with 19 of them hospitalized, according to the city’s governor, Aleksandr Beglov.
Tatarsky represented a radical wing of pro-invasion bloggers and activists who backed Moscow’s war but also criticized what they saw as the flaws in the Russian Army. His death was the most significant attack on a prominent war supporter inside Russia since August, when a car bomb killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of an ultranationalist Russian supporter.
Kyiv did not immediately comment on the bombing. But an adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, suggested that the attack was a sign of internal fractures in Russian society, in line with Kyiv’s usual description of acts of sabotage in Russia.
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