A Ukrainian citizen will be put on an “international wanted list” over suspicions of being an accomplice to the bombing at a St. Petersburg cafe that killed a pro-Kremlin military blogger, the Russian secret service said Thursday.
Yuriy Denisov is accused of supplying the bombing’s main suspect with “an explosive device camouflaged as a plaster bust of a military commissar,” Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said in a statement.
“The procedure for putting him on the international wanted list has been initiated,” according to the statement.
According to the FSB, Denisov traveled to Russia last February “on the instructions of the Ukrainian special services” and “collected information about the lifestyle and places visited” by the military blogger, Vladlen Tatarsky, who was killed in the April 2 blast in St. Petersburg.
Tatarsky — whose real name was Maxim Fomin — was part of a group of high-profile, pro-Russia influencers filing reports on the war in Ukraine. He had more than half a million followers on Telegram.
On April 3, one day after the bombing, a young woman suspected of being responsible for the blast, Darya Trepova, was detained by Russian law enforcement, and charged with terrorism the next day.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office, then blamed an “internal political fight” for the bombing, tweeting that Russia had “returned to the Soviet classics: isolation … espionage … political repression.”
This is the second time a pro-Kremlin media figure has been killed on Russian soil since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine. Last August, Darya Dugina — who was under U.S. sanctions for spreading misinformation about the war — was killed in a car bombing.
