Moscow – How – Washington DC – Follow-up
Publication date: April 04, 2023 00:08 KSA
Russia yesterday accused Ukraine of colluding with supporters of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a terrorist attack that killed a popular military blogger who advocated an invasion of Ukraine in St. Petersburg on Sunday. And they announced the arrest of Daria Trepova, a Russian citizen suspected of committing a terrorist attack, who, according to the authorities, was active in the Navalny Anti-Corruption Fund banned in Russia since 2021. The police released a statement. a video clip in which a 26-year-old woman confesses that she brought a small mined figurine, from the explosion of which blogger Maxim Fomin, better known under the pseudonym Vladlen Tatarsky, died. The girl refused to disclose the source of the bomb and to make statements about the organization of Alexei Navalny. The dissident, who has been imprisoned for more than two years, is serving a nine-year sentence for fraud and is also on trial for extremism. “It has been proven that the terrorist act committed on April 2 in St. Petersburg … was planned by the Ukrainian special services, who recruited agents, including employees of Navalny’s alleged anti-corruption fund,” the Russian Anti-Terrorism Committee said. A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the “terrorist act.” The day before, Ukrainian presidential spokesman Mykhailo Podolak denied any Kyiv responsibility for the attack, suggesting on Twitter that it was the result of “domestic terrorism” fueled by rivalries within the Russian regime. For her part, Navalny’s press secretary, Kira Ermech, condemned the allegations against his organization. “Aleksey will soon be tried for extremism and faces 35 years in prison,” she wrote on Twitter. The Kremlin said it would be great to be able to add a charge of “terrorism” in the future. The public news agency TASS reported that a young woman who was arrested yesterday had previously been detained for ten days after demonstrating against the Russian attack. The blogger was killed Sunday in a cafe in St. Petersburg during a rally organized by an organization called Cyber ZFront, which supports the operations of Russian forces in Ukraine. According to the latest data, 32 people were injured in the attack, eight of them in serious condition, and the force of the explosion was equivalent to the impact of 200 grams of TNT. And the owner of the cafe was the head of the Wagner Military Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The latter yesterday morning in Telegram confirmed that he had given away the Cyber ZFront cafe. The explosion is reminiscent of last August’s terrorist attack that killed Darya Dugin, a vocal supporter of the attack on Ukraine and the daughter of ultranationalist writer Aleksandr Dugin. Russia blamed the attack on Kyiv, which denies involvement. Unlike the authorities, Yevgeny Prigozhin appears to have ruled out that Ukrainian intelligence was responsible for the two murders. the work of a group of extremists. On Saturday, Prigozhin paid tribute to the blogger in a video that appears to have been filmed in the town of Bakhmut, the epicenter of the fighting in eastern Ukraine. The 40-year-old blogger killed on Sunday was from Donbass in eastern Ukraine. Vladlen Tatarsky has been visiting Russian troops on the front lines and has over half a million subscribers on his Telegram channel. According to Russian media, in 2011 he was imprisoned in Ukraine on charges of theft. He managed to escape from prison in 2014, after which he joined pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country. Blogger career, according to Kommersant daily. According to the TASS news agency, the activist appeared shortly after the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, posting videos analyzing the situation on the ground and advising Russian forces. And in September last year, he attended a ceremony in the Kremlin dedicated to the announcement of the annexation of four Ukrainian regions to Russian lands, and said in front of the camera: “We will defeat everyone, kill everyone, steal everyone.” people to steal, and everything will go the way we want.”