Who is the woman arrested for the murder of a Russian blogger supporting
the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
Investigators in Russia have arrested anti-war activist Daria Tripova on charges of murdering pro-Russian blogger Vladilon Tatarsky. Blogger Ladlin Tatarsky, a supporter of the invasion of Ukraine, was killed and 30 others were injured in a hotel in St. Petersburg. The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia has confirmed his arrest.
Russian media reported that Daria Tripova presented blogger Tatarsky with a statuette before the explosion. It is feared that explosives were hidden in the statue. Authorities say the attack in the center of Russia's second-largest city is being seen as a "high-profile murder" that was carefully planned and involved many people. Russia's Anti-Terrorism Committee has alleged that the attack was planned by Ukraine's special services in collaboration with opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Navalny has been in prison since returning to Russia from Germany in January 2021. He survived a nerve agent chemical attack in Russia in August 2020, which was blamed on Russian security service agents. The blogger was attending the meeting at Tatarsky Cafe as a guest speaker where he exhorted the participants to be patriotic.
In a video circulating on social media, a young woman dressed in a brown coat can be seen entering the cafe with a cardboard box. The photos also show the box is placed on a table in the cafe before the woman sat down. Another video shows a statue being handed over to Tatarsky, possibly from the same box.
Who is Daria Tripova?
Darya Tripova's detention on charges of murdering blogger Vladylan Tatarsky has raised questions about the young woman's background and political views. Russian media reports said Tripova, 26, gave Tatarsky a statue believed to have contained the explosives that killed him. Later, in a video released by the Russian Ministry of Interior, she is seen admitting this.
However, her statement may have been taken under duress, and she did not say whether she knew about the explosives. Her friends and family say she was an anti-war activist and was detained during a protest at the beginning of the war, but her views were not extremist and she could not kill anyone.
Her husband, Dmitri Rilov, believes that she has been tricked. An acquaintance of Daria Tripova told the BBC that she attended a school in Pushkin, a town outside St Petersburg, adding that she "didn't have any political views at the time". Other sources say that he later enrolled at St. Petersburg State University, although it is not clear whether he completed his course or not.
According to another friend of hers, she worked for a long time at a clothing store in the city but left her job a month ago to move to Moscow. It is not clear how long she has been married to her husband Rilof. In an interview on the Agent2 Telegram channel, Tripova's friends said that their marriage was a 'joke' and that they were really just friends.
Some reports said the two were arrested on February 24 last year during an anti-war rally at the start of the invasion of Ukraine and were held for 10 days. Reloff is said to be a member of a small opposition group, the Libertarian Party, which was involved in the protests. The party says that he has left the country.
Some reports said that Riloff is also wanted in connection with the murder. She insisted that she couldn't have killed herself to SVTV News. He declared, "I have no doubt that my wife has been unfaithful." Well, it's true that none of us favor the war in Ukraine, but we think that such behavior is wrong, he said.
Reports say that Russian investigators are not ruling out the possibility that Daria Tripova did not know what was in the statue. Sources have said that Daria Tripova had been in contact with blogger Tatarsky, who was killed in the explosion and had also participated in events where the blogger was also present.
Cafe
Street Food Number One, near the Neva River, was once owned by Yevgeny
Prigozhin, the leader of the infamous Wagner group of mercenaries fighting
alongside the Russian army in Ukraine. The Wagner group has taken an active
part in the battle for the city of Bakhmut in northern Ukraine.
Prigojan says that he has handed over this cafe to 'Cyber Front Zee'. Cyberfront Zee calls itself Russia's information army. Prigosion has paid tribute to slain blogger Tatarsky, real name Maxim Foman, in a video. Prigozhn claimed to have recorded the video in the town of Bakhmut, which Russian and Ukrainian forces are fighting over.
Who was Vladimir Tatarsky?
Tatarsky,
a supporter of Russia's war in Ukraine, was not a Russian official nor a
military officer. He was a popular blogger with more than five lakh followers.
He also had a criminal past, just like Praguz.
Born in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, Tatarsky was jailed for robbery and released when Russia seized eastern Ukraine, joining Russian-backed separatists. He was part of a pro-Kremlin military blogger community that supported Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
He was among the bloggers who criticized Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, for the failures of Russian troops in Ukraine. Tatarsky, unusually, also reported from the front while fighting. They claimed that they had helped launch the drone strikes.
In September last year, when President Putin announced the annexation of four parts of Ukraine to Russia, Tatarsky posted a video from inside the Kremlin saying 'We will defeat all, kill all of us. will put, we will rob everyone if necessary.' Military bloggers have provided insight into the war in a country where many have become frustrated by the lack of accurate information from official sources.
The
perpetrator of the St. Petersburg explosion is still unknown, but the incident
is similar to the one that claimed the life of anti-war activist Daria Dogina
in a car bombing outside Moscow last August.
Russian
officials have already indicated that Ukraine is responsible for the explosion.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhilo Podoliak blamed the explosion on
Russia's internal political infighting, tweeting that "spiders in a pot
are eating each other."
Ukraine has demonstrated in recent months that it is capable of conducting drone strikes and detonations inside Russian territory. Ukraine rarely admits involvement in such an attack, but often gives hints. The leader of the mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said he did not think it was the Ukrainian government. "I think a group of extremists is working, which has nothing to do with the government."
Qiu has said that the blast may be related to political infighting in Russia. Many agitators in Russia now carry guns. Russia has released imprisoned criminals and sent them to the front to make up for the lack of troops on the battlefield. Russian authorities have also launched a massive recruitment campaign for volunteer fighters, conscripting nearly three hundred thousand people for 'partial mobilization'.
