Vladlen Tatarsky was killed and 15 people were hurt in the explosion at the "Street Bar" café in St Petersburg, Russia's second-largest city. Photo / AP
Vladlen Tatarsky was killed and 15 people were hurt in the explosion at the "Street Bar" café in St Petersburg, Russia's second-largest city. Photo / AP
Daria Trepova, the blonde 26-year-old said to have delivered the St Petersburg bomb, will forever be known as the chief suspect behind one of the more inventive assassinations in Russian history.
But the person who planted the explosive is only part of the story. The real question is, who werethey working for?
Footage inside shows him dressed in jeans and a dark T-shirt, smiling and joking as he accepts the chunky golden bust of himself Trepova confesses to have delivered.
A few moments later, he was blown up by more than 200 grams of a TNT equivalent that Russian investigators appear to believe was concealed inside the ornament.
It also had the means: the Ukrainian special services have a proven track record of covert spectaculars deep behind enemy lines. Witness the September explosion on the Kerch bridge, which also claimed a number of civilian lives as collateral damage.
Indeed, the killing has echoes of the August murder of Darya Dugina - a small bomb, delivered apparently by a young female operative, targeting an ideologist and propagandist deep in the Russian heartland. The US has said Ukraine carried out the hit.
However, there are others who also had means, opportunity, and no less motive. The Ukrainian government seems to back the idea of an internal Russian job.
To understand why, it is worth revisiting Tatarsky’s rise to fame.
Maxim Fomin, Tatarsky’s real name, was not, in the ordinary sense of the word, a journalist. He eschewed the normal distinction between participant and observer, frequently dressing in full battle gear, including a rifle and tactical recognition flashes, while on “assignment”.
Nor was he a native-born Russian. He was born in Makiivka, the same Donetsk region town as former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.
Like the young Yanukovych, he had a difficult relationship with the law.
When Russia first invaded in 2014, he was doing time for armed robbery in a prison in Horlivka, another rough town in the Donetsk region.
Somehow amid the chaos of that spring, he got out and joined the “opolchenye”, a rag-tag “separatist” militia led by an alliance of Russian secret agents, adventurers and mercenaries.
After the active stage of the war was over, he moved to Russia, adopted the pen name Vladen Tatarsky, and reinvented himself as a war blogger and writer.
Like many veterans of that war, he was drawn into the network around Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner mercenary group.
And like several other bloggers thought to be on Prigozhin’s payroll, he has been a loyal footsoldier in the Wagner chief’s war with the Russian Ministry of Defence during the current invasion.
Those tensions have reached an extraordinary pitch.
Back in December, Progozhin moved from complaining about ammunition shortages to openly calling Gen Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, a “f****t”.
Pro-Wagner bloggers like Tatarsky, who had more than half a million Telegram followers, amplified those criticisms of the army to a degree that was becoming intolerable.
It is possible that on Sunday, the Ministry of Defence - or maybe the FSB, or the GRU, or another state-linked outfit - decided to draw a line.
Messages of displeasure do not come blunter than killing an ally and protégé of Prigozhin, in a café owned by Prigozhin, in Prigozhin’s home city.
Russia’s security services have a liking for using small, compact bombs in targeted killings - including of inconvenient friends.
Those with long memories will recall the fate of Akhmat Kadyrov, a supposed Moscow ally blown up in 2004 by a bomb only the Russian security services could have planted.
And there are more recent suspicious explosions.
In the aftermath of the 2014-15 war, a number of prominent pro-Russian fighters were blown up far behind the front line.
Alexander Mozgovoy, idiosyncratic leader of the “Ghost” battalion, died in a roadside bombing in 2015; in 2016, Arsen “Motorola” Pavlov was killed by a bomb planted in the lift of his apartment block. The following year, someone fired a rocket launcher into the office of the fighter known as Mikhail “Givi” Tolstykh.
Finally, Alexander Zakharchenko, the rough-hewn “prime minister” of the Donetsk People’s Republic, was blown up by a bomb planted in a café in the middle of Donetsk in 2018.
The Russian and “DPR” authorities blamed the Ukrainians for those assassinations. It is not implausible. They were all men who Kyiv had reason to kill.
But they were also uppity, difficult to control, violent men whose presence complicated Moscow’s efforts to tame the quasi-states it had created in Donetsk and Luhansk.
They were inconvenient, and expendable. And their deaths have never been solved.
For what it’s worth, Progozhin himself publicly doubted the Ukrainian government’s role.
“I wouldn’t blame the Kiev [sic] regime for these actions,” he wrote on Telegram on Sunday night, acknowledging the similarities to Dugina’s murder. “I think that a group of radicals is active, who are unlikely to have any relation to the government.”
He didn’t mention which government he was talking about.
Whoever is responsible, two things are already clear from Tatarsky’s death. The first is how the war has come home.
When the Kremlin launched its first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, it seemed to think it could isolate the resulting lawlessness and violence in the quasi-independent states it set up in east Ukraine. Now, assassination bombs are going off not in Donetsk, but in downtown St Petersburg.
Secondly, there is going to be a brutal retaliatory crackdown. Russia’s National Anti-Terrorist Committee claimed without evidence that the attack involved jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation.
Vadim Tatarsky was a blogger who thrived on the immediacy of 21st-century social media, and his death was reported on Telegram, his favoured medium for his half a million followers, in almost real-time.
The room was full of people with camera phones who captured the moments before and immediately after the blast. A traffic camera caught the exterior as an orange flash blew out the restaurant windows. Tatarsky’s well-connected colleagues and friends rapidly got hold of leaked police and other information. The whole world knew about the statue, and the woman who allegedly handed it over, in just a few hours. By Monday morning, St Petersburg police had tracked her down and detained her.
