Joshua Yaffa writes about Darya Trepova, who has been sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison for killing the Russian propagandist Vladlen Tatarsky using a bomb.
A man in the crowd, one of Tatarsky’s supporters, filmed the chaotic scene with his phone—“I think our speaker is fucked,” he said—and captured the moment when the woman who gave Tatarsky the statue walked out into the street, dazed and wobbly.
She was quickly identified as Darya Trepova, a twenty-six-year-old former medical student from a suburb of St. Petersburg. Friends described her as an avowed vegan and a connoisseur of vintage fashion. She was an idealist, always eager to help and, by her own admission, a little naïve. Trepova was arrested at a friend’s apartment early the next morning. Russian investigators released an interrogation video, clearly filmed under duress, in which Trepova looks terrified and exhausted. “I brought him this statuette, which exploded,” she says. When asked who gave her the device, she demurs, saying, “Can I tell you later?” On January 25th, a St. Petersburg military court sentenced Trepova to twenty-seven years in prison for carrying out what prosecutors alleged was an act of terrorism. It was among the longest prison sentences ever given to a woman in modern Russian history. But who was Trepova, exactly, and what did she know about the plot in which she apparently played a decisive role? During the trial, Trepova revealed more details about the operation. It all began with an exchange over Twitter in the spring of 2022, not long after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “I was very upset when the special military operation was launched,” Trepova said in court, according to transcripts of the hearings published by the independent Russian news site Mediazona. “I didn’t support it and sympathized with Ukrainians.” She wrote a message to a Russian activist and journalist named Roman Popkov, who was based in Kyiv, and said that she wanted to move to Ukraine and volunteer as a medic. Popkov had a long history in radical anti-Kremlin movements and, from Ukraine, had covered the war in Bucha and Bakhmut. That September, Trepova said, he got in touch to help her “see things with your own eyes,” she recalled him saying. “My understanding was that Roman was doing a journalistic investigation.” He told her that he planned to set up a journalism school in Kyiv, where, he implied, Trepova would be welcome to enroll. Trepova was inclined to accept the offer, but, she told friends, she first had to carry out a series of test assignments in Russia. Before long, Popkov introduced her to a man known by the alias Gestalt, who, through messaging apps, began peppering her with instructions: go here, pick up this package, set up a new phone. Gestalt also instructed Trepova to buy books written by Tatarsky and to attend his public events. He sent her money for the expenses in cryptocurrency. At one point, Gestalt asked Trepova to fly to Omsk, in Siberia, for one of Tatarsky’s lectures, and to introduce herself as Anastasia Kriulina, a name lifted from an actual art student who lived in St. Petersburg. “I am often asked when the war will end,” Tatarsky told the audience in Omsk. “I always answer, ‘Never.’ Because Russia has always waged war and will wage war.” Last March, Gestalt sent the statuette as a package in the mail to Trepova, and told her to give it to Tatarsky in person. She testified that, at first, she was afraid it might be a bomb. She remembered the case of Darya Dugina, a pro-war propagandist and the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin, a well-known pseudo-philosopher and intellectual godfather to the Russian militaristic right. Dugina had been killed by a car bomb in Moscow in August, 2022. “I was very scared and asked Gestalt, ‘This won’t be the same as with Darya Dugina?’ ” Trepova said in court. He replied that, no, there was only a wiretap and a tracker. As Trepova headed to the event in St. Petersburg, Gestalt asked her to grant him access to her phone so he could monitor the scene in real time. She attended in character, as Anastasia, and took a seat in the back row. When she rose to present the statuette, Tatarsky recognized her from their meeting in Omsk. “Come sit here,” he said, pointing to a chair near him. In the first disorienting moments after the explosion, Trepova said, she thought, How strange—someone detonated a bomb on the same day she came with a listening device. Then she understood. She called Gestalt, angry and in a panic. “You can ask questions later,” he told her. She continued to shout at him. Gestalt replied, “When you come to Ukraine and visit us, you can hit me.” Trepova remarked in court, “This made me very angry.” Last week, at the close of the trial, Trepova had a chance to address the courtroom. “I am very hurt and very ashamed that my gullibility and my naïveté led to such catastrophic consequences,” she said. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone. . . . And that’s why I’m especially pained and ashamed that a terrorist attack was carried out with my hands.” When I spoke with Rylov recently, he told me that, though he and Trepova shared a general inclination toward opposition views—“That was obvious, it didn’t need to be discussed,” he said—neither of them were particularly engaged in politics. They were shocked, however, by Russia’s invasion in February, 2022. “I remember that day,” he told me. “There was barely any news. We didn’t understand much. But it was clear such a thing cannot be tolerated.” That evening, they joined hundreds of protesters who marched down Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg’s main thoroughfare, and were detained by riot police. Rylov was sentenced to nine days in jail; Trepova, ten. Nonetheless, Rylov said, “Life continued as usual.” At the time, Rylov and Trepova were just friends, having met at a party in St. Petersburg a couple of years earlier. But, that March, a few weeks after their arrest, he proposed—more a means of facilitating a move abroad than a gesture of true love, he admits. Still, they married and began getting their documents in order. But, Rylov insists, over time their feelings became deeper and more romantic. That September, when Russia announced a military draft, Rylov left the country. He and Trepova fell in and out of touch. As to what happened next, Rylov told me, “She was rather secretive about everything.” She spoke vaguely of some tasks she had to carry out, such as writing analytical articles on, for example, the difference between attitudes toward the war in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Other times, she had to go to a particular shop and buy a greeting card or a book. “She said she couldn’t say anything more,” Rylov said. But he heard in her voice a mounting sense of uncertainty and paranoia. “It seemed clear to me she didn’t like what was going on,” he told me. “But she couldn’t bring herself to sit down and put the pieces together.” When Rylov raised objections, Trepova deflected. “She knows how to calm people down, to convince them everything is O.K.,” he said. Last March, Trepova mentioned the statuette, telling Rylov—as she later testified in court—that she believed it contained a listening device. “Dasha was very worried about this statue,” Rylov said, but not because she considered it a dangerous weapon. She kept it at her apartment. According to Rylov, her main concern was that, when she gave the statuette to her target—she never said who or what that might be—it would come apart or otherwise be revealed as a secret listening device. Still, she pressed ahead. “She said it would be the last task before they facilitated her move,” Rylov told me. On the morning of April 2nd, Trepova sent Rylov a picture from her breakfast at a café. He knew that she had a plane ticket to leave Russia later that day, purchased by the mysterious friend he knew little about. That evening, he got another message from her: “I’m in trouble. I need to hide somewhere.” Rylov hadn’t seen the news and didn’t understand what was going on. His friend Dmitry Kasintsev, a twenty-seven-year-old math tutor, agreed to let Trepova hide out in his apartment. That night, Trepova sent Rylov another message. “I was set up.” She said the people who had given her the assignment had stopped answering her messages. “She felt in that moment that she was completely abandoned,” Rylov said. The police showed up that morning and found Trepova lying in bed. She told the officers that she knew why they had come. Rylov knew that, even if Popkov were to make a public statement, it likely wouldn’t mean much for Trepova’s legal case. “I know how Russian courts work,” he said. But he cared about Trepova’s image. “I want to clear Dasha’s name,” Rylov said. “So that people see she was used in total darkness, she didn’t have the slightest idea.” Trepova’s greatest qualities were also what made her vulnerable. “They used Dasha’s trust and kindness to carry out this malice.” In a jailhouse letter she sent to the Russian media outlet Bumaga, Trepova wrote, “I hope that those who ruined my life and the lives of others for the sake of momentary and illusory gain will answer for this one day.” Popkov told me he is a member of a Russian partisan faction based in Ukraine, a claim that is at once plausible—such groups have indeed carried out incursions into Russian territory—and impossible to verify. He listed the types of operations his network has been involved in: sabotage and other attacks aimed at “propagandists, the military-industrial complex, transport infrastructure.” He compared Tatarsky to Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Stürmer, a virulently antisemitic tabloid published in Nazi Germany. Even though Streicher did not serve in the German military under Hitler and took no direct part in the Holocaust, he was convicted of incitement to genocide at the Nuremberg trials and subsequently hanged. “Unfortunately, we cannot afford to wait for our own Nuremberg,” Popkov told me. “It will surely come, but not soon enough. So we have to work here and now.” As for Tatarsky’s killing, Popkov said, “This was an operation of the Russian underground of which I am a participant.” He couldn’t go into more detail, both to preserve operational security and, he claimed, to protect Trepova herself. “This person is in captivity, a hostage, held by vampires and ghouls,” he said. “We have to be very sparing in how we talk about this.” I asked whether he considered the Tatarsky operation a success. “This success has a very bitter taste,” he said. “The fact that a war criminal, terrorist, and murderer was punished is very good. He wasn’t the first and he definitely won’t be the last.” But, he went on, “It would be impossible to say I’m happy with how this operation turned out.” In a public post, Popkov had called Trepova “the brightest light that has appeared in Russia in the past thirty years.” I asked him what he meant. “I’m Russian myself, and have lots of Russian friends, but I don’t know anyone with such a strong sense of justice as her,” he said. He considered Trepova a friend and was devastated both by the circumstances she found herself in and by his own inability to say more. “I cannot and will not talk about these things until Dasha is a free person in a free country,” he said. “For now, all I can say is that everything she has said in court is truthful. . . . I confirm the testimony that she gave during trial. This is the wording I can allow myself.” ♦
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