Igor Girkin, known as an extreme nationalist, also received a four-year sentence in a separate court case.
Vilma Romsi,
Roni Kuronen,
Elsa Osipova
26-year-old Russian woman Darya Trepova has been sentenced to 27 years in prison for last year’s bombing of a St. Petersburg cafe that killed a prominent Russian war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky.
The news agency Reuters and British broadcasting company BBC.
According to the court, last April, Trepova had arrived at an event organized by Tatarski in the cafe. In the cafe, Trepova had handed the blogger a statue depicting this. Tatarski died moments later after the statue exploded in his hands.
According to Trepova’s defense, the woman was tricked into committing the act. According to the defense, the people who gave the statue to the woman had said that it contained a listening device instead of a bomb.
However, the St. Petersburg court found Trepova guilty of a terrorist act.
It is the harshest sentence given to a woman in the history of Russia.
Bomb Ukraine plot?
Criminal investigators in Russia have accused Ukraine of planning the bombing. However, Ukraine has not denied or admitted its possible involvement.
According to the BBC, Trepova presented evidence in court that she followed the instructions of her contact in Ukraine. The man’s identity is unknown; he is known only as Gestalt.
Trepova says that she got in touch with the man, a journalist with a Ukrainian background by Roman Popkov through. Trepova says she opposes Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, and that she sought to work as a journalist in Ukraine.
The woman says that she gained Tatarski’s trust with the help of Gestalt’s instructions and introduced herself to him as an art student named Anastasia Kriulina.
– I feel great pain and shame for my gullibility and the fact that my naivety led to such a catastrophic outcome. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, Trepova told the court, according to Reuters this week.
Tatarsky, real name Maxim Fomin, strongly supported Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. The 40-year-old blogger was from the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. His Telegram channel had more than half a million subscribers.
Tatarski was one of those war bloggers who criticized the Russian leadership and even Vladimir Putin failures on the front.
Despite this, Putin posthumously awarded Tatarsky the Russian Medal of Courage.
Judgment also for an extreme nationalist
The Moscow court also sentenced a Russian extremist nationalist today by Igor Girkin to four years in prison, Reuters and AFP report.
Girkin was convicted of inciting extremism.
Girkin is a former FSB officer who helped Russia occupy Crimea in 2014. He was also involved in orchestrating pro-Russian separatism in eastern Ukraine.
During the war of aggression against Russia, Girkin has become known as a critic of the regime. Girkin was arrested in July.
In 2022, a Dutch court sentenced Girkin and two others in absentia to life imprisonment for the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2014.
Updated on 25.1. 18:22: Added information about Girkin’s sentence from the Dutch court.