The vintage designer who "unknowingly" murdered a Russian propagandist
WHO. Daria Trepova was born in 1997 in Saint Petersburg. After the start of the invasion of Ukraine, she was arrested during protests against the war. THAT. In April of this year he participated in the attack against the Russian military propagandist Vladien Tatarsky by giving him a figure that turned out to be full of explosives. BECAUSE. Trepova says she was persuaded to approach Tatarsky and alleges she did not know he was carrying an explosive.
On April 2, 2023, a blonde woman walked into the Street Food Bar in St. Petersburg with a figurine packed with explosives and handed it to Russian propagandist Vladen Tatarsky. The explosion killed Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin, and injured 52 people. Everything happened following a plan drawn up from Ukraine.
The mysterious woman is called Daria Trepova. She likes vintage clothing, she occasionally designed dresses and worked in a vintage fashion store.. Now he is cold in a cell, where the lack of books and cigarettes is fatal..
She is the main accused in the case of the murder of the Russian propagandist, who months before his death called to “loot Ukraine”. But he did not want to admit his guilt in court: he says he killed him without knowing anything about the matter. He claims that a journalist he met on social media convinced him to approach his target using a false name: “They told me he was carrying out investigative journalism,” he said in a letter to Bumaga..
“The most unbearable thing is that my hands killed one person and injured dozens. The only thing I would like to say, without diminishing my guilt: violence begets violence,” he told Russian media outlet Rotonda in May.. He faces 20 years in prison in a trial that began this week.
During the first hearing before the Military Court of Saint Petersburg, the accused stated that she did not admit her guilt because she did not know what was inside the figure: she herself survived, “by pure chance,” she recalls.. In fact, Trepova gave Tatarsky the figure and immediately sat down quite close.. It feels like I didn't know what was going to happen..
The young woman, charged with terrorism for her alleged responsibility in the murder of the blogger, known for defending the war in Ukraine, says that she followed orders and regretted being “easy to deceive”.
Two dead and 83 injured
After the explosion, cameras filmed his departure from the scene.. “When I realized what happened, I immediately wrote to my mother and apologized.. “When the agents told me that my mother, when they were taking her for interrogation, screamed that she was going to kill me, it made me want to die.”. Months before the attack, Trepova had already published on X (formerly Twitter) that she “thought about suicide between 20 and 150 times a day”
According to the investigation, 85 people were victims of the attack. One of them, a 58-year-old man, died this month from causes related to the injuries he suffered.. The investigation considers that this crime was carefully prepared for a long time in Ukraine “by people who did not agree with the special military operation”, which is what Russia calls the invasion and occupation of the neighboring country since last year.. Trepova only fully admitted guilt to the charge of using a false driver's license..
The defendant's friends and family say that while Trepova is a peace activist who was detained in a protest at the beginning of the war, her position was not radical and that she is incapable of killing someone. Trepova's husband was the first to suggest that his wife may have been the victim of cheating. Russian media claim that the young woman even had a correspondence exchange with the explosion victim and that she attended events with him.