(Saint Petersburg) Russian justice announced that it had sentenced Daria Trepova on Thursday to 27 years in prison, a 26-year-old young woman accused of the explosive murder in April 2023 of a Russian nationalist blogger specializing in the assault on ‘Ukraine.
This assassination, orchestrated according to Moscow by Ukraine – which has never confirmed – caused a stir in Russia, particularly among the most fervent supporters of military intervention in neighboring Ukraine.
Daria Trepova “was sentenced to 27 years in a penal colony,” a military court in Saint Petersburg (northwest Russia) where the trial took place said in a statement.
The young woman listened to the verdict, dressed in a white sweater with oranges, from the glass cage of the accused, according to an AFP photographer.
The prosecution had requested 28 years of imprisonment against Daria Trepova.
This is the most severe sentence publicly handed down against a woman in Russia since the fall of the USSR, the Ria Novosti agency reported, specifying that, according to Russian law, a woman can receive a maximum of 30 years in prison in case of terrorism accusation.
The blogger Vladlen Tatarskiï, whose real name is Maxime Fomin, was killed in April 2023 after accepting a booby-trapped statuette, in a Saint Petersburg cafe, from the hands of Daria Trepova. The explosion also injured around thirty people.
She was then quickly arrested for “terrorism” and placed in detention. Moscow accused Kyiv and “agents” of imprisoned opponent Alexeï Navalny of being behind the operation.
During her interrogation and her trial, the young woman always assured that she did not know that she was carrying a bomb, believing that she had been manipulated.
She said she believed that the statuette contained a listening device.
“Always ashamed”
“I want to apologize for what happened, I am still ashamed,” she declared in January to the judges, quoted by Russian media.
Mme Trepova claimed to have acted at the request of a person in Ukraine whom she only knew as “Guechtalt” and that the latter had assured her that the booby-trapped statuette contained “a microphone”.
She also assured that she accepted the mission because of her opposition to the assault launched by Russia against Ukraine, which the victim supported and covered on social networks.
President Vladimir Putin had more generally pointed out the supposed role of Western secret services in attacks described as “terrorist” on Russian soil.
He also decorated Tatarskii posthumously, awarding him the “Order of Courage”.
Kyiv, for its part, has never confirmed its involvement in this assassination, and Ukrainian officials believed that it was an internal settling of scores within Russian nationalist circles.
Ukraine has been accused by Moscow of several targeted attacks, such as the one which caused the death in August 2022 of Daria Dougina, daughter of the ultranationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, or the one which seriously injured the writer Zakhar Prilepin in May 2023 , fervent support of the assault in Ukraine.