Vladlen Tatarsky: Explosion in Russian cafe killing prominent military blogger being treated as murder

The killing of Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky is being investigated as a "high-profile murder", authorities have said.

Russian investigators detained a 26-year-old woman in the hunt for the killers of a pro-war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky in a blast at a St Petersburg cafe.

Darya Trepova was placed on the interior ministry's wanted list and her arrest was later confirmed by Russia's Investigative Committee.

Vladlen Tatarsky was killed in the explosion at the Street Food Bar No 1 cafe in St Petersburg. The Russian group that organised the event said it had taken security precautions, but added that “regrettably, they proved insufficient”.

Russian investigators and police officers stand at the side of an explosion at a cafe in St. Petersburg. An explosion tore through a cafe in the Russian city of St. Petersburg on Sunday, and preliminary reports suggested a prominent military blogger was killed and more than a dozen people were injured. (AP Photo)

Tatarsky had supported the fighting in Ukraine and was speaking at a patriotic discussion event.

Twenty-four others were taken to hospital and six were in critical condition, the health ministry said.

Russia's Investigative Committee, the country's top criminal investigation agency, has opened an investigation into what it described as a "high-profile murder".

No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack – and it remains unclear who is behind it, however, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak blamed the blast on a Russian "internal political fight", tweeting: "Spiders are eating each other in a jar."

“Question of when domestic terrorism would become an instrument of internal political fight was a matter of time.”

It is also unclear exactly how the device was delivered with official sources quoted by Russian state media stating that Tatarsky was presented with a statue in a box as a gift, which had a bomb hidden inside.

The cafe targeted on Sunday was previously owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia's notorious Wagner group.

Russian authorities blamed Ukraine for the attack, but Kyiv denied involvement.

The group who hired the cafe, Cyber Front Z, a group calling itself "Russia's information troops" called the incident a “terrorist attack.”

Mr Tatarsky had filed regular reports from Ukraine. Tatarsky is the pen name for Maxim Fomin who had accumulated more than 560,000 followers on his Telegram messaging app channel.

After the Kremlin’s annexation of four regions of Ukraine last year, Mr Tatarsky posted a video in which he vowed: “That’s it. We’ll defeat everybody, kill everybody, rob everybody we need to. It will all be the way we like it. God be with you.”