A Russian art graduate unwittingly murdered a prominent Kremlin propagandist during a fake audition for a job in journalism, Russian media has reported.
Darya Trepova believed she was on a “propaganda resistance” test for a job at a Kyiv-based website when she handed Vladlen Tatarsky the bomb that killed him, Fontanka, a St Petersburg news site, reported.
It cited leaked transcripts of her interrogation by Russia’s FSB security service.
Russian prosecutors on Tuesday charged Ms Trepova with terrorism, two days after Tatarsky, 40, was killed in the blast.
The investigative committee, which probes major crimes, said it had charged Ms Trepova with committing “a terrorist act by an organised group that caused intentional death”. It carries a maximum jail term of 20 years.
The committee said Ms Trepova had acted under instructions from people working on behalf of Ukraine.
Fontanka claimed Ms Trepova “was offered a job on a news website in Kyiv” but first had to prove “she knew how to resist Russian propaganda”.
During her arrest on Monday, the 26-year-old admitted that she had carried the bomb into the cafe. Her husband said that she was framed.
The bomb was hidden in a golden bust of Tatarsky. He was the only person killed when it exploded at a talk he was giving at the venue while more than 40 people were injured.
The Kremlin and the FSB have accused Ukrainian secret services of organising the attack. They leaked dozens of videos and photos which they said prove Ms Trepova’s guilt.
Ms Trepova is known to be a supporter of Alexander Navalny. 46, the imprisoned Russian opposition leader, and also to oppose Mr Putin’s war in Ukraine but. However, she has said that she was an unwitting bomb mule in Tatarsky’s assassination.
According to Fontanka, Ms Trepova had met him at a talk a few days earlier. She was then told to collect a package from a contact and hand it to Tatarsky on Sunday.
An FSB officer asked Ms Trepova if she was suspicious of the package. “I wasn’t specifically told what was in it but I suspected something bad,” she said.
A video of the moment before the bomb exploded at the Street Bar appeared to show Tatarsky and Ms Trapova on familiar terms. After she hands him the bomb, he asks her to sit to one side, closer to him.
She does not appear alarmed or give the impression that she has just handed over a bomb to a murder target.
Another video, filmed outside immediately after the bomb blast, shows Ms Trepova walking slowly, as if in a daze, out of the smashed cafe. She appears uninjured and walks away.
This is the second high-profile assassination of a Kremlin propagandist in the past eight months. Ukraine was blamed for killing pro-war journalist Darya Dugina, 29, with a car bomb in August but Kyiv denied that it had killed Tatarsky.
The propagandist, who had 560,000 subscribers on his Telegram channel, was closely linked with the Wagner mercenary group and its chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has dismissed the theory that Ukraine was behind the murder.
Mr Prigozhin has made plenty of enemies within the Russian establishment and security service and many analysts have said that the murder of Tatarsky, in a cafe owned by the Wagner chief, was meant as a warning.
But if so, it is a warning that Mr Prigozhin appears determined to face down. In a video, released through his Telegram channel on Tuesday, he sits on a chair at the exact spot where Tatarsky was killed. The floor and the walls of the cafe are still charred and black.
“You saw the murder of Tatarsky, the terrorist act,” he tells several members of a group called Z-Patriots who had organised the talk. “Now you need to receive more impetus.”
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