The bombing at a St Petersburg cafe that killed a military blogger could have been part of “infighting” between the Russian military and the Wagner Group, Western officials have said.
Vladlen Tatarsky - who fervently supported Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine - was killed on Sunday as he led a discussion at a cafe.
The cafe is owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the millionaire who heads the Wagner Group military contractor spearheading Moscow’s offensive in eastern Ukraine.
Relations between the company and the Russian military have deteriorated as the war drags on, with Prigozhin recently accusing Moscow’s military leaders of “high treason” for failing to provide enough ammunition.
Russian authorities have arrested of Darya Trepova, a supporter of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
She had previously been detained for participating in a rally against the war on February 24, 2022, the day of the invasion, and spent 10 days in jail.
But Western officials have called into question what really happened. “At the moment the Russians have obviously tried to pin it onto a Navalny supporting anti-war, anti-Kremlin lobby, whether that turns out to be correct, I’m not sure if that’s the case,” one official said.
“It certainly shows internally within Russia there are divisions. I think the choice of the target will be questionable to which side would actually conduct the attack.
“The fact was in Prigozhin’s cafe would maybe give you another avenue to explore and people will daw conclusions from that.”
The official added: “If you’ve got anti-war demonstrators setting off bombs in St Petersburg that is relatively significant for the Russians to deal with.
“If it’s part of infighting between Prigozhin and the [Russian] MoD then I would say that is very significant as well.”
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak also responded to the news of the bombing by casting it as a result of infighting in Russia.
“Spiders are eating each other in a jar,” he tweeted in English late on Sunday. “Question of when domestic terrorism would become an instrument of internal political fight was a matter of time.”
Tatarsky, who had filed regular reports from the front lines in Ukraine, was the pen name for Maxim Fomin. He had accumulated more than 560,000 followers on his Telegram messaging app channel.
The bombing, which also wounded more than 30 other people, was the latest attack inside Russia on a high-profile pro-war figure. Last year, a nationalist TV commentator was assassinated when a bomb exploded in her vehicle outside Moscow.
Investigators said they believe the bomb at the cafe was hidden in a bust of the blogger that a member of the audience gave him just before the explosion. A video showed him joking about the bust and putting it on a table next to him.