‘You made her into a walking bomb’ Husband of woman charged with pro-Kremlin blogger’s murder pleads with Kyiv-based journalist to confess to framing his wife
The husband of Darya Trepova, the St. Petersburg resident charged with the murder of pro-Kremlin “war correspondent” Vladlen Tatarsky last year, addressed Kyiv-based Russian journalist Roman Popkov on social media on Wednesday, demanding he confess to orchestrating Tatarsky’s assassination and tricking Trepova into handing him the bomb that killed him.
“I’m certain that you had a hand in sending Dasha to be sacrificed without her even realizing it. I know that Dasha [thought she was] completing some kind of ‘test’ that you gave her, and now it’s obvious that there were never plans for any kind of test,” Trepova’s husband, Dmitry Krylov, wrote to Popkov on X (formerly Twitter). He continued:
A person who sincerely wanted to help the injured and the sick, a person who always stood for the truth, a person who’s been driven all her life by the immense power of helping others and is incapable of harming anyone — you (or people close to you) made that person into a walking bomb who was supposed to die, but, by some miracle, survived.”
After accusing Popkov of wishing Trepova had died in the blast along with Tatarsky, Krylov pleads with him to nonetheless do something brave “at least once” in his life by telling the truth for Trepova’s sake:
I ask you to explain how it all happened. Describe how you, or people connected to you, convinced Dasha to take the figurine to Tatarsky, not knowing what it contained. Show the screenshots of your messages. Take the blame on yourself. Go ahead, promote your views, I’m not concerned about that, but it’s vitally important that you say that Dasha truly didn’t know anything and was used — after all, that’s the truth, and the truth is what I’m defending, and I’d like to think it’s what you’re defending too.
Tatarsky was killed by a blast in a St. Petersburg cafe on April 2, 2023, shortly after Trepova handed him a small bust of himself. Russian investigators believe the sculpture contained a remotely controlled explosive device. The day after the war blogger’s death, Trepova was arrested and charged with Tatarsky’s murder. While Trepova opposes the war in Ukraine, she and her relatives have maintained that she was framed and did not know the bust contained a bomb.
Roman Popkov is a former leader of Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party, which was banned in 2007 as an “extremist organization.” He was added to Russia’s federal register of terrorists and extremists in May 2023 and charged with organizing Tatarsky’s murder soon after. He has denied having played any role in the assassination and says he only knew Trepova through social media.
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