Yesterday, a Russian military blogger going by the handle of Vladlen Tatarskiy – real name Maksim Fomin – was assassinated in Saint Petersburg during a meet-and-greet event with subscribers in a cafe. Specifically, during the event one of the attendees, a young woman now identified as Darya Trepova, gave Fomin a statuette, ostensibly as a gift, which contained a bomb. The resulting explosion killed the recipient instantly, and, as of this writing, injured at least 30 of the attendees, around 10 of them seriously. Authorities have already managed to track down and arrest the young woman in question – not in small part due to the omnipresence of surveillance cameras typical of any modern city – and, undoubtedly, further revelations will be forthcoming in the future. In the meantime, however, there is an important point to be made that, per se, has nothing to do with Fomin specifically.
A disclaimer. I have never read Fomin’s – Vladlen’s – Telegram channel, which seems to have accumulated over 500 thousand subscribers prior to his death, nor have I watched any of his video content. I have seen the name mentioned here and there, and he was apparently sufficiently visible or influential to have been amongst the invitees to the ceremony of accession of four formerly Ukrainian regions to the Russian Federation in the Kremlin last year. Nevertheless, I cannot personally judge the man or his work, though I suspect that, as with so many other popular military bloggers in the the Russian social media space have done over the past year, his position was generally pro-government and pro-war. This, in turn, would render him, in the eyes of both Ukrainian and Western media, a bearer of Russian government propaganda, with all that this entails.
Let us stipulate, for a moment, that Fomin-Vladlen was not merely a Russian propagandist, but one so vile and despicable that his assassination was warranted as a sort of a public service, if nothing else. Let us also stipulate that his death would have made for some kind of a tangible media victory in Ukraine – a highly visible evil expunged from existence – and, thus, was worth arranging.
The problem, however, is this. He was not gunned down in the street; he was not killed coming home late one night; he was not ambushed in his dwelling by a counterfeit pizza delivery man; he was not blown up in his car by a bomb hidden under the driver’s seat; he was not, in the style of so many Mafia movies, kidnapped and executed in a dilapidated warehouse or thrown off a pier. If you think about it, most people in the developed world are really not that difficult to assassinate. We have no bodyguards, most of us1, no Secret Service to keep watch for any evil doers, we have predictable routines, we are often alone for some stretches of time, and, crucially, we tend not to expect to ever have to defend ourselves from an assassin. If the Ukrainian intelligence services, let us suppose, or even a small group of highly motivated individuals, wanted Fomin-Vladlen dead, one could come up with at least a half-dozen ways in which they could have done so without exposing any bystanders to danger.
Instead, Fomin-Vladlen was killed by a bomb detonated in a cafe filled with innocent people. To belabour the point, of all the ways in which to assassinate him, the killers, whoever they were, chose to blow up a crowded cafe. They chose to blow up a group of people, along with Fomin-Vladlen himself, whose only discernible crime at this stage is that they read his blog, and came out for a meet-and-greet event with, from their standpoint, a minor celebrity.
That, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is not an assassination. That, by definition, is an act of terrorism.
And this, in turn, should, at least in theory, present a problem even to the staunchest supporters of all things Ukraine. The presence of at least 30 bystander casualties subverts the narrative of an evil being vanquished. For Western audiences, one must either pretend that these casualties do not exist, or, as in the case of at least a couple of commentators, put forth that the bomb had nothing whatsoever to do with Ukraine and, instead, that Fomin-Vladlen was killed as part of some political or inter-service rivalry within Russia itself. With Russian audiences, in the meanwhile, the bombing is but another nail in the coffin of mobilising any kind of meaningful antiwar sentiment. A blogger being shot down in a dark alley one night might have gone unnoticed, or, at least, relatively unremarked, and, in any case, maybe he’d brought it on himself somehow. But a bomb that injures at least 30 people? In the middle of Russia’s second largest city, its so-called cultural capital, and, not coincidentally, Vladimir Putin’s own hometown? Someone ought to be made to pay for this outrage, and not just the young woman who delivered the explosive device to its target.
And then, of course, there are the moral considerations. Even if Fomin-Vladlen were the next coming of Joseph Goebbels, which he surely was not, was killing him worth endangering 30 other lives? Surely these are not the sort of tactics that the designated “good guys” should ever engage in? Surely we have not reached the point where simply being Russian renders one a legitimate target, reminiscent though that might be of an earlier time2?
I am not even mentioning the fact that, technically, to the extent one believes in the concept of “freedom of speech”, even pro-Russian government bloggers such as Vladlen, so long as they do not cross certain lines, have the right to voice their opinions in public without risking being killed for them. Freedom of speech has been a highly tenuous and politicised concept more or less since the very founding of the Republic, starting with the Sedition Act of 1798. In the intervening two and a quarter centuries, silencing or outright killing3 individuals who put forth narratives that clash with those advanced by the US government has become a regular feature of US politics and policy. But here, again, the aim seems to have been not to just kill Fomin-Vladlen, but to terrorise the Russian public by attacking his subscribers as well.
Again, is this the sort of behaviour that the “good guys” engage in?