Pro-war Russian military blogger killed in blast at St Petersburg cafe

One person has died and at least 16 people have been injured in a blast in a cafe in St Petersburg, Russia.

Pro-war Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky was killed in the explosion, the Russian interior ministry said.

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 invasion of Ukraine.

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There has been no indication of who was responsible for the destruction at the “Street Bar” cafe in Russia’s second-largest city.

Russian media and military bloggers said Tatarsky was meeting with members of the public and that a woman presented him with a statuette that apparently exploded.

If Tatarsky was deliberately targeted it would be the second assassination on Russian soil of a figure associated with the 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.

“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 analyst Sean Bell told Sky News that it “looks really unlikely” that the Ukrainian military was behind the St Petersburg attack as it wasn’t a military target.