No official evidence has yet been presented about who carried out the deadly attack at a St. Petersburg cafe Sunday, but officials in both Russia and Ukraine have already suggested they know who was behind the attack.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said it was an example of growing threats against Russian journalists on the part of the Ukrainian government. She claimed Russians face “threats of reprisal from the Kyiv regime.”
Zakharova decried Western countries and international organizations, who she said had not expressed “elementary human sympathy” since Tatarsky’s death. And she said the blogger had provided invaluable information about what was happening in Ukraine, making him “dangerous” and “hated” in Kyiv.
(Zakharova’s claims come days after American journalist Evan Gershkovich was detained in Russia on espionage charges, which the US and his employer — the Wall Street Journal — have dismissed as false.)
A Ukrainian presidential official, meanwhile, suggested the killing was due to in-fighting in Russia.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, wrote on Twitter: “Spiders are eating each other in a jar. Question of when domestic terrorism would become an instrument of internal political fight was a matter of time.”