This Monday, April 3, Moscow accused Ukraine, with the complicity of supporters of imprisoned Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, of orchestrating the attack in which a famous partisan blogger was killed on Sunday in Saint Petersburg. of Russia’s offensive against its neighbour.
The attack on Russian military blogger Maxim Fomin was “ planned by Ukraine’s secret service, which recruited agents among those collaborating with Navalny’s so-called Anti-Corruption Fund “, assured the Anti-Terrorism Committee of Russia, this Monday, April 3. That same day, investigators also announced the arrest of a young woman, Daria Trepova, a Russian national presented as an activist for Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, banned in Russia since 2021. The police then released a video in which this 26-year-old woman admits to having brought a booby-trapped statuette whose explosion caused the death of the blogger also known under the pseudonym of Vladlen Tatarsky. She refuses to say for the moment where the bomb came from and does not say a word about the organization of Alexeï Navalny. According to the state news agency Tass, the arrested young woman was known to justice for having been imprisoned for ten days after demonstrating against the Russian offensive.
Set up
After the accusations against Mr. Navalny’s organization, his spokesperson, Kira Iarmych, denounced a set-up by the Kremlin. ” Alexei will soon be tried for extremism, he risks 35 years. And the Kremlin said to itself: it’s great for the future to be able to add “terrorism” to it. “, she wrote on Twitter. The opponent, imprisoned for more than two years, is serving a nine-year prison sentence for fraud and is also being prosecuted for extremism.
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The day before, an official of the Ukrainian presidency, Mykhaïlo Podoliak had denied on Twitter any involvement, considering that it was a question of “ domestic terrorism due to rivalries within the Russian regime. The spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, denounced “ an act of terrorism “.
” A group of radicals »
Taking the opposite view of the authorities, the leader of the paramilitary group Wagner, Evguéni Prigojine, seemed to rule out that these assassinations were prepared by the Ukrainian secret services. ” I will not accuse the kyiv regime of these acts. I think a group of radicals is in action “, he said on the Telegram channel of his press service. The previous evening, he had paid tribute to the blogger in a video apparently filmed from the town of Bakhmout, the epicenter of the fighting in eastern Ukraine.
The 40-year-old blogger killed on Sunday was from Donbass, an eastern Ukrainian region at the heart of the conflict. Vladlen Tatarsky, who was regularly on the front on the Russian side, had more than half a million subscribers on his Telegram channel. According to Russian media, he had been imprisoned in Ukraine for a robbery in 2011. In 2014, taking advantage of clashes sparked in eastern Ukraine by separatists led by Moscow, he escaped from prison to join these fighters. In 2019, he left the separatist forces, according to the daily Kommersantto make a name for himself as a blogger.
(With AFP)
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