A Russian war correspondent died in an explosion in a café in the center of the Russian Baltic Sea metropolis of Saint Petersburg on Sunday. Another 16 people were injured when the explosive device detonated, according to the Tass state agency. The 40-year-old journalist and blogger using the pseudonym Vladlen Tatarskij, who comes from Donbass in eastern Ukraine, was killed on the spot.
According to the AFP news agency, the Russian Interior Ministry confirmed the blogger’s death.
According to officially unconfirmed media reports, Tatarsky, whose real name is Maxim Fomin, had invited to a “patriotic evening” on Sunday in the café in the center of Saint Petersburg, which according to media reports is said to belong to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the notorious Wagner mercenary group.
There was initially no official information about the background to the explosion. According to the investigators’ initial findings, the explosive device was built into a statuette that was presented to Tatarsky as a gift at the meeting.
