Z-Blogger Assassinated By Bomb in Central St. Petersburg

Where are the spooks when you need them?

Yesterday, Vladlen Tartarsky, a popular and well-known Z-Blogger was assassinated at a gathering of fans and like-minded patriots right in the center of St. Petersburg, literally within eyesight of all those famous monuments and palaces that you associate with the city.

His last livestream

I even know the cafe he hosted the event at too. The food was bad and overpriced, but it didn’t deserve to be blown up!

…

Yeah, I probably shouldn’t joke. But perhaps you will forgive my attempt at levity as you read on and realize why I preemptively tried to cheer you up.

Vladlen was a very well-known and popular war correspondent.

Those are good Telegram numbers.

He fought in Donbass as a separatist militiaman back in the day and then leveraged his celebrity to focus on his own media project since then. As for his views? Well, I’d characterize them as generic pro-Z and nothing too edgy. In other words, he was firmly representative of about 80% of the Z-public in the way he presented his narrative, the words he used and his entire worldview and so on.

This does not mean that he was a sovok, no.

He preferred White Army symbology and promoted Orthodoxy heavily.

His Telegram channel’s avi

He was friendly with the Kremlin and was invited to Putin’s speeches, including the one announcing the annexation of LDNR. He did, however, criticize the Kremlin like pretty much all war-bloggers in Russia do for fighting the war badly and ineffectively. Despite his occasional criticism, he was part of the “optimist” camp.

Here, I ought to explain the two dominant views on the war among the Russian war bloggers. In short, the optimists believe that the war is being fought badly and that the leadership made many mistakes, but that victory is still within Russia’s grasp. For the longest time, I was firmly in this camp. This comes off as strange to the Westerner because they are not aware of any constructive criticisms whatsoever of the Kremlin because they only read people like Lira, Saker, Macgregor, Ritter and other mindless cheerleaders. I am the only English voice that I am aware of providing this perspective. But criticism of the war effort is so mainstream in Russia now that it even gets voiced on the state media by guests with increasing frequency. In the West though, this kind of talk gets interpreted as being pro-NAFO/NATO propaganda, naturally.

Now, the pessimists believe that the war is being fought badly and that the leadership are traitors or that a significant portion of them are - enough to sabotage the war effort anyways. I have come around to this view in recent months myself. And the pessimists did not like Tatarsky because they viewed him as a sell-out and a gatekeeper personality in the same way that we would view media figures like Steven Crowder or Ben Shapiro as ideological gatekeepers keeping the American masses pacified with siren songs of voting harder and convincing Messicans to vote Republican. But this characterization is a bit too harsh because while Tatarsky’s brand of patriotism was indeed the kind that was acceptable to the Kremlin, it was also probably what he more-or-less believed in himself anyways, organically.

Either way, moderating his views and making friends with the Kremlin did not save him.

Here is one version of what happened: a Galician woman and a possible male accomplice showed up at his event. She stood up to ask a question, told him that she was a big fan who had sent him fan mail, and then asked to present him with a statue of himself as a gift that she had made herself. The statue, which had been confiscated at the entrance for potentially being a bomb, was then fetched and given to Tatarsky, who was blown up soon after by the TNT in it, along with many people in the cafe who got caught in the blast.

At the time of this writing, there are conflicting reports about the woman’s whereabouts. Some say that she is in the hospital, but it is unclear why.

To make this matter worse, there’s already a new story making its rounds that this was actually a homegrown terrorist. Some Liberal woman from Moscow and her Libertarian boyfriend who fled the country long before any bomb plot was effected. Some say she’s already out of the country, almost certainly in Estonia.

Who knows. I don’t want to spread disinfo. All I know is that:

• they didn’t catch Dugina’s killer and that there were also several culprits fingered in the early hours of that event as well.

• there are cameras everywhere in both Moscow and St. Petersburg

• either the FSB is criminally incompetent or …

**

Now here is the interesting part where we start speculating about what really went down and why.

So, Tatarsky was friendly with the Kremlin, but also able to criticize the war effort on occasion.

Could it have been in someone’s interests to eliminate this potential source of conflicting information piercing through the Kremlin’s echo chamber?

We know that Moscow and Kiev have not touched one another’s elites. There are no targeted strikes on key decision-makers in Ukraine - politicians, NATO officers, Ukrainian command, spooks and so on are off-limits. And the same detente appears to be in place vis-a-vis Moscow as well.

Could it be that Kiev knows it can kill Z-patriots with impunity so long as they do not touch Moscow’s elites?

We know that most of Moscow’s elites are sweating bullets and want the war to deescalate now that it is clear that Russia is losing. There are also such people in Ukraine and even in the West. A face-saving peace is possible and clearly desired by powerful people on both sides.

Could it be that this was a deliberate escalation to make peace talks harder?

Also, Ukraine considers former Ukrainians fair game and kills them all the time. Russia does not respond in kind, effectively giving Kiev carte blanche to kill pro-Russians in Ukraine.

Case in point: there was yet another assassination bombing in Novorussia today. The former head of the administration in the region, Maksim Zubarev, got hit with a planted car bomb and rushed to the hospital, but is probably already dead.

One thing is for sure: Russia sure does a bad job of taking care of its supporters.

The Kremlin seems to be able to take care of its own though.

These two things are not the same.