A Russian woman was sentenced to 27 years in prison on Thursday over the bomb assassination of an ultranationalist military blogger.
Courts imposed prison sentences in two telling cases that are connected to the region's war on Ukraine. One of which serves as a threat to pro-war Russians who criticize the military's performance on the battlefield while the other is a warning to Russians who support Kyiv.
A military court in St. Petersburg sentenced Daria Trepova, a young anti-war activist, on terrorism charges connected to the murder of a prominent pro-war blogger in a cafe. The decision was the harshest known sentence for a woman in modern Russian history.
The 26-year-old defendant was arrested last spring and accused of giving a statuette that had a bomb inside to Maxim Fomin. The latter was a pro-war commentator and Telegram blogger who had half a million followers and was known by his pen name Vladlen Tatarsky. The resulting blast from the makeshift explosive resulted in Fomin's death, as per the Washington Post.
Russian investigators said that Trepova collaborated with a Ukrainian "sabotage and terrorism group." They argued that the latter gave her various tasks and requested that she track down Tatarsky, his fans, and Cyber Front Z, a pro-invasion online troll group that described itself as the "digital troops of Russia."
Authorities released and published videos on social media that showed Trepova handing Tatarsky the golden statuette, which subsequently exploded. Other footage showed her leaving the cafe in St. Petersburg where the incident occurred.
Trepova maintained in court that she did not know that the figure she handed Tatarsky had explosives inside and believed that it only contained a listening device. She argued that she believed that her mission was simply to establish audio surveillance on the military blogger.
The defendant's husband, Dmitry Rylov, said that he is convinced that her wife has been set up to take the blame for the murder of Tatarsky. The military blogger supported the war in Ukraine and gained popularity by providing analysis and commentary on Telegram. Much of his content advocated for a harsher approach towards Kyiv, according to CNN.
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Sentenced to 27 Years
Tatarsky first created his Telegram channel in 2019 and named it in honor of the protagonist of Victor Pelevin's novel "Generation P." Since then, he has written several books and previously fought among Russian forces in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, in 2014.
Trepova was initially charged with "a terrorist act carried out by an organized group causing intentional death" as well as the illegal possession of explosive devices created by an organized group.
In court, the defendant gave evidence that she was following orders from a man in Ukraine who was known as Gestalt, which is German for "shape," and his true identity is still unknown. Trepova said she made contact with the man via Ukraine-based journalist Roman Popkov.
She said that under Gestalt's orders, she gained the military blogger's trust, introducing herself as an art student named Anastasia Kriulina and attending his talks. Trepova said that she felt great pain and shame that her gullibility and naivety led to catastrophic consequences, said BBC.
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