A military court in Saint Petersburg yesterday sentenced Daria Trépova to 27 years in prison, accused of killing with a bomb last year the well-known Russian military blogger Vladlén Tatarski, whose real name was Maxim Fomín.
Tatarski died on April 2, 2023, in a meeting in his honor with his followers in a cafe restaurant in Saint Petersburg. In the audience was Trépova, who presented him with a statuette. An explosive device was hidden inside. The explosion caused the death of the blogger and left 52 injured. According to the artisans, the homemade device had a power of about 200 grams of TNT.
Trépova, 26, admitted she had brought the sculpture to the restaurant, but denied knowing there was a bomb inside and said she delivered the gift from an admirer of the blogger. He also admitted that he had used false documents to get to him.
One of the organizers of the meeting, Ivan Sankov, told the court that when she gave him the gift, Trépova said her name was Anastasia, a student at the Art Academy, and that she had made the statuette herself .
“I didn’t know who Vladlén Tatarski was. When I met him in person, he seemed kind and humorous. I didn’t hate him. I didn’t wish him dead”, she said in her turn to have the last word. Vladlén Tatarski, who was 40 years old, was one of the most followed military bloggers during Russia’s current military intervention in Ukraine.
The Prosecutor’s Office argued that the version of the accused has not been confirmed. He said the woman carried the device during a period of martial law and that the blast was triggered remotely from an Estonian SIM card.
The prosecutor also said that the accused had received around 132,000 rubles (1,350 euros) in a cryptocurrency wallet, money that she used to prepare the murder. He bought tickets to St. Petersburg and Moscow, souvenirs and postcards.
The court that tried her in recent months found her guilty of attack, illegal trafficking of explosive devices and falsification of documents. He will have to spend 27 years in a penal colony with a strict regime and, in addition, pay a fine of 600,000 rubles (about 6,100 euros). According to local media, Trépova’s 27 years is the longest sentence ever handed down to a woman in Russia.
As for the organizer of the attack on Tatarsky, the FSB public relations center pointed to the special services of Ukraine and “their agents”, including Russian opponents abroad. Their main suspect is a Ukrainian citizen named Yuri Denisov, who allegedly delivered the artifact to Trépova in Moscow through a courier service and a middleman. After the attack, he fled Russia.
On the other hand, the Russian judiciary also sentenced prominent Russian nationalist Igor Guirkin, nicknamed Strelkov, to four years in prison after finding him guilty of inciting extremism. Guirkin was in 2014 at the head of the pro-Russian independence forces in the Donbass and currently supported the Russian military campaign against Ukraine, but recently he had turned against the Kremlin.
It is the first time that someone who supports (and in this case, fervently) the so-called “special military operation” has been convicted. Guirkin, 53, had accused Putin and army chiefs of incompetence and of not effectively directing the military campaign in Ukraine. “I serve the country!”, he shouted after being convicted.
