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3 Apr. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeni Prigozhin, has blamed on Monday the bomb attack carried out on Sunday in a cafeteria in Saint Petersburg in which the Russian blogger Vladlen Tatarski died, as “radicals”, disassociating the Ukrainian authorities from the event.
“I would not blame the Kiev regime for these actions,” he said, after referring to the death of Daria Dugina, daughter of ultranationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, in a bomb attack in August 2022. “I think it is a group of radicals and I see it as unlikely that they have a relationship with the (Ukrainian) government,” he said.
“For now I do not know the details of the incident, but I was informed that, unfortunately, Tatarski died,” he said, before confirming that the cafeteria in which the attack was perpetrated is his property. “They held several seminars there,” he highlighted, according to a message on the official account of his office on the social network Twitter.
The words of Prizoghin, an oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and head of an organization responsible for sending mercenaries to Ukraine, came shortly after Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee said the “terrorist act” was “planned by the special services of Ukraine” with the “participation” of “people who collaborate with the so-called Navalni Anti-Corruption Fund”, created in 2011 by opponent Alexei Navalni.
The Russian authorities have arrested Daria Trepova this Monday for her alleged responsibility in the murder of the blogger, whose real name is Maxim Fomin. The man, born in the Ukrainian region of Donbas (east), was participating in a “creative event” in the cafeteria when he was given a figure that concealed the explosive, according to sources quoted by the Russian news agency TASS.
Tatarski was one of the bloggers with contacts in the Russian forces who routinely criticize military commanders, although they rarely target Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin himself has recognized the importance of these propagandists to the point that the Kremlin has created a body to coordinate the government with these content creators.
