Russian military blogger killed in blast in St Petersburg

They quoted the interior ministry as confirming the death of Tatarsky and saying that 25 people had been wounded.

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 an often critical running commentary on Russia's war in Ukraine.

He was among hundreds of attendees at a lavish Kremlin ceremony last September to proclaim Russia's annexation of four partly occupied regions of Ukraine, a move that most countries at the UN condemned as illegal.

"We'll defeat everyone, we'll kill everyone, we'll rob everyone we need to. Everything will be as we like it," he was shown saying in a video clip on that occasion.

A St. Petersburg website said the explosion on Sunday took place at a cafe that had at one time belonged to Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner private army that is fighting for Russia in Ukraine.

There was no indication of who was behind the blast.

If Tatarsky was deliberately targeted, it would be the second assassination on Russian soil of a high-profile figure associated with the war in Ukraine.

Russia's Federal Security Service accused Ukraine's secret services last August of killing Darya Dugina, the daughter of an ultra-nationalist, in a car bomb attack near Moscow that President Vladimir Putin called "evil".

Ukraine denied involvement.

At nightfall in St. Petersburg, police investigators remained at the scene of the explosions with officers sifting through the debris of the blast inside the cafe. Outside, a small bunch of flowers were placed on the base of a street lamp on the other side of the main street on which the cafe is located.

Russia's state Investigative Committee said it had opened a murder investigation. State-owned RIA news agency said 25 people were wounded and 19 of them were being treated in hospital.

TASS news agency quoted an unnamed source as saying the bomb was hidden in a miniature statue that was handed to Tatarsky as he addressed a group of people in the cafe.

Mash, a Telegram channel with links to Russian law enforcement, posted a video that appeared to show Tatarsky, microphone in hand, being presented with a statuette of a helmeted soldier. It said the explosion happened minutes later.

Denis Pushilin, the Moscow-installed leader of the part of Ukraine's Donetsk province that is occupied by Russia, suggested publicly that Ukraine was to blame.

"He was killed vilely. Terrorists cannot do otherwise. The Kyiv regime is a terrorist regime. It needs to be destroyed, there's no other way to stop it," he said.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser, wrote on Twitter that it had only been a matter of time - "like the bursting of a ripe abscess" - before Russia would be consumed by what he called domestic terrorism.

"The spiders are eating each other in a jar," he said.

Russia's war bloggers, an assortment of military correspondents and freelance commentators with army backgrounds, have enjoyed broad freedom from the Kremlin to publish hard-hitting views on the war, now in its 14th month. Putin even made one of them a member of his human rights council last year.

They reacted with shock to the news of Tatarsky's death.

"He was in the hottest spots of the special military operation and he always came out alive. But the war found him in a Petersburg cafe," said Semyon Pegov, who blogs under the name War Gonzo.

Alexander Khodakovsky, a leading pro-Moscow figure in eastern Ukraine, wrote: "Max if you were a nobody, you'd have died of 'vodka and head colds. But you were dangerous to them, you did your business as no one else could. We will pray for you, brother."

Reuters