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Jan. 25 (UPI) -- Russia on Thursday sentenced a suspect in the bombing of a pro-war blogger and a far-right detractor of President Vladimir Putin to prison in two separate cases. Darya Trepova was sentenced in St.Petersburg to 27 years in prison for the death of Russian war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin.
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The sentence was one of the longest ever given to a woman in Russia.
Trepova, a known anti-war activist who had already been detained for protesting Russia's invasion of Ukraine was arrested in April 2023 on charges that she handed Tatarsky a statuette loaded with explosives.
The resulting blast at the crowded Streetfood-Bar No. 1 in central St. Petersburg killed Tatarsky who was one of Russia's leading and popular pro-war bloggers and injured 30 more people.
In her trial, Trepova charged that she was deceived by a man from Ukraine who went by the name of Gestalt, the German word for "shape," who told her the statuette was a listening device and had no idea about the explosives.
In the second case, Igor Girkin, an ultra-nationalist former Russian-back militia commander in Eastern Ukraine, was sentenced in Moscow to four years in prison for criticizing Putin and Russia for holding back in its invasion of Ukraine.
He was found guilty of inciting extremism in the case brought by the Federal Security Service, which he formerly worked for, over posts on his Telegram channel that called for severe punishment of the leaders of a pair of Russian regiments in Crimea.
"Most families of mobilized soldiers did not receive any due payment for three months while the breadwinners were risking their lives and health on the front lines," Girkin wrote in one of the posts. "Execution by shooting is not good enough for something like this."
His posts on Telegram, where he boasted a following of more than 760,000 people also called for Russia to mobilize its entire society and economy to bolster the Ukraine invasion and called for Putin to relinquish leadership "to someone truly capable and responsible."
Girkin had been one of the darlings of Moscow for his military leadership in Russia's takeover of Crimea in 2014 and the marshaling of pro-Kremlin militias in eastern Ukraine. He had already been found guilty in absentia for in 2022 for for taking part in the shooting down of the Malaysia Airlines commercial passenger plane that killed all 298 on board.
