The next video showed the aftermath of the explosion and Tatarsky’s body, covered in blood.

Several people who had been drinking in the bar picked their way through the rubble. They had been badly cut and bruisedc, but the only person killed was Tatarsky in what increasingly looks like an assassination.

“There were a lot of listeners at the meeting,” said Polina Butorina, who had been in attendance. “During the meeting, one of the guests handed the statuette to Yegor, the host, who then handed this statuette to Tatarsky. A few minutes later it exploded and we all ran outside.”

Within an hour of the murder, commentators started looking for culprits.

For Russian nationalists, Kyiv’s fingerprints were all over his death. Ukrainian forces had, after all, killed Darya Dugina, another pro-war Russian journalist in August with a car bomb attack outside Moscow.

“[Volodymyr] Zelensky is personally responsible for this attack,” said Sergei Markov, a former adviser to the Kremlin and a political commentator. “The attack was professionally prepared.”

Ukraine has not claimed any responsibility and officials there blamed internal ruptures in Russia for the attack. Many Ukrainians also celebrated the death of the hated Kremlin stooge.

“Vladlen Tatarsky demonstrated that he hated Ukrainians more than any Russian. It is this hatred that tore him apart,” said Ukrainian military blogger Yury Butusov.

If it was an internal strike, it would be a remarkable step change in domestic Russian opposition to Vladimir Putin and his war in Ukraine. The Kremlin has crushed all dissent in Russia and it appears to have been a sophisticated attack that took patience, planning and audacity to pull off.

It does, though, come a month after a group of Russian neo-Nazis fighting for Ukraine had crossed over into Russia and attacked a village. In their attack, which was largely dismissed as a PR stunt, the group, called the Russian Volunteer Corps, encouraged anti-Kremlin Russians to rise up and fight back.

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A woman called Darya Trepova was later identified by some Russian media as a suspect for the killing after Russia’s interior ministry added her to their wanted list without explanation. The 26-year-old St Petersburg resident has been previously detained for taking part in anti-war rallies.

Still, the Kremlin will likely react to the death of a favoured propagandist as it did with Dugina’s assassination, by firing cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities.

Tatarsky may have been one of the Kremlin’s most influential front-line propagandists, sending back dozens of video dispatches, but he was also a man with enemies.

He regularly disparaged the ministry of defence for being cumbersome and second-rate compared to Wagner mercenaries. So close was he to Prigozhin and the Wagner mercenaries that he even appears to have borrowed from their branding, using a similar skull and crossbones on a black background as his Telegram avatar.

He last updated his Telegram feed at 2pm, a few hours before he was killed, urging the Russian army to use cluster bombs against the Ukrainian army and praising Wagner adverts that he had seen across Russia.

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Tatarsky was one of the most rabid anti-Ukrainian military bloggers calling on Russians to kill as many as possible. He was born in the Donetsk region of Ukraine in 1982 when it was the Soviet Union. His real name is Maxim Fomin. He took his pseudonym “Vladlen” from a Russian novel. He had been a petty criminal before 2014 and had been imprisoned several times.

The initial Russian invasion of 2014, supported by some pro-Russian militia in Ukraine’s Donbas region, allowed him to reinvent himself as a Kremlin puppet.

In September, Tatarsky had been filmed in the Kremlin’s grand Hall of Mirrors celebrating Putin’s illegal annexation of four regions of Ukraine. In the video, Tatarsky said: “We will defeat everybody, we will kill everybody, we will rob everybody and everything will be as we want it to be.”

The Telegraph UK

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