A lady who was allegedly engaged in the murder of a military blogger who supported the Kremlin has been arrested.
The FSB and Investigative Committee detained Daria Trepova today in St. Petersburg.
According to earlier reports, she was “on the run” because police believed she had given Vladlen Tatarsky the explosive that caused his death and the injuries of 32 others on Sunday in a café in St. Petersburg.
Her first words on being detained at Severnaya Dolina residential complex were ‘I was set up. I was just being used’, according to pro-state Shot media.
She was earlier placed on the interior ministry’s wanted list and her arrest was later confirmed by Russia’s Investigative Committee.
Tatarsky, who had more than 560,000 followers on Telegram and had reported from the frontline in Ukraine, had been handed the gold bust by an unidentified woman.
Footage allegedly shows Trepova, who was previously detained at anti-war rallies, walking to the café carrying a box that ‘may have the statue inside’.
One report claims security tried to stop the woman from bringing it inside due to fears it could be an explosive.
But she asked Tatarsky for permission and he said ‘bring in it….we will check if there is something inside’.
Someone at the event claimed the images ‘show the moment after the young woman gave him the bust and started walking back to her seat’.
‘Vladlen stopped her, and asked her to sit next to him. She said she was shy, but then she went to sit close, as we can see on the second picture’, they said.
But a report by Telegram channel VCK-OGPU claimed it had access to Trepova’s private web exchanges with a friend in a secret web chat.
After the explosion Trepova allegedly messaged her friend to say: ‘I could have died there, I’d rather have died there, I was set up.’
Trepova’s partner is reported to be Dmitry Rylov, a member of the so-called Russian Liberation Army who is also reportedly wanted by the secret services.
But he is reported to have said: ‘I am in full confidence that she would never be able to do something like that on her own volition.
‘Yes, with Daria we really do not support the war in Ukraine, but we believe that such actions are unacceptable.
‘I am 100% sure that she would never have agreed to such a thing if she had known.’
According to him, she ‘completely misunderstood the purpose’ of the statuette she allegedly gave to Tatarsky.
Her flat has been searched and some reports say her mother was arrested.
A second suspect was earlier named as Maria Yarun, 40, who was born in Ukraine and is said to be in hospital in St Petersburg.
Trepova didn’t show up for her planned flight at Pulkovo airport in St Petersburg last night, Izvestia reports.
It’s suggested she was planning to fly to Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, via Istanbul.
A video shows Tatarsky vowing the destruction of Ukraine, which has faced devastation since Vladimir Putin sent troops in last February.
‘We’ll conquer everyone, we’ll kill everyone’, he boasted. ‘We’ll loot whoever we need to, and everything will be just as we like it.’
Some Russian outlets have accused Ukrainian authorities of being involved but others it is currently unclear who is responsible.
Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin admitted he had owned the cafe where the explosion killed Tatarsky, but said he’d since passed the cafe to a patriotic movement called Cyber Front Z.
He said: ‘They were doing various seminars there. It is indeed similar to the murder of Darya Dugina [daughter of a Putin ideologue who was killed aged 29 last year in a car explosion].
‘I would not blame the Kyiv regime for it. I think it was a group of [Ukrainian] right wing radicals who did it, which is unlikely to be linked to the government.’
The pro-Putin speaker of the Russian senate Valentina Matviyenko paid tribute to Tatarsky, saying he ‘wrote the truth’ and ‘did a lot for our future victory’.
‘As a result he became a target for our enemies, who are afraid of the strength of our spirit, our people’s will’, she said.