A pro-war Russian military blogger was killed in an explosion in a St Petersburg cafe on Sunday, allegedly after being handed an explosives-ridden bust as a gift.
Russian officials said Vladlen Tatarsky was killed as he was leading a discussion at the Street Bar cafe, with 32 people wounded in the blast.
Mr Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin, had more than 560,000 followers on social network 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.
Russia’s state Investigative Committee said it had opened a murder investigation.
According to some Russian media reports, Tatarsky was meeting with members of the public when a woman presented him with a box containing a bust of him that allegedly blew up.
Russia’s Interfax news agency reported that a St Petersburg woman was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the bombing.
Russian media said investigators were looking at the bust as the possible source of the blast but have not ruled out the possibility that an explosive device was planted in the cafe before the event.
No-one has declared responsibility for the explosion, with Russian military bloggers pointing the finger of blame at Ukraine - which is denied by Kyiv.
Some Russian commentators have compared the bombing to the killing last August of Darya Dugina, a nationalist TV commentator, who was killed in a car bomb outside Moscow.
Russian authorities blamed Ukraine’s military intelligence for Dugina’s death, but Kyiv denied involvement.
Reacting to the latest incident, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Tatarsky’s activities “have won him the hatred of the Kyiv regime".
But a top Ukrainian government official cast the explosion that killed Tatarsky as part of internal turmoil.
“Spiders are eating each other in a jar," Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote in English on Twitter.
“Question of when domestic terrorism would become an instrument of internal political fight was a matter of time.”
Tatarsky 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.
Military bloggers have played an increasingly prominent and influential role in the flow of information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
They have almost universally championed the war but have at times criticised Russian military strategy and tactical decisions.
At the same time, the Kremlin has cracked down on voices opposing the war by shutting down news outlets, limiting the public’s access to information and jailing critics.
