A video of Darya Trepova, the woman arrested in the April 2 assassination of war reporter Maxim Fomin, whose popular Russian blog went under the pseudonym of Vladlen Tartasky, was released by Russia’s Interior Ministry today. Trepova relates a story that she was given a statuette that she was told had a listening device to catch Fomin’s conversations; that she presented it to Fomin; and had departed the café within 5-10 minutes.
Beyond what is on the video, Shot news says that their sources report that she said that one Roman Popkov, who had “taught her journalism,” asked her to “do a task” for a “contact” of his. Shot’s sources say that the contact is in the Ukrainian Internal Security (SBU), and Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee said today that she was acting on behalf of Kiev. Trepova said that she brought the statuette to St. Petersburg in her car several days ago. She seems to have been on the periphery of the Alexei Navalny anti-Putin movement.
Roman Popkov, as an activist and chapter-leader with the now defunct “National Bolshevik Party” (NBP), has spent his adult life working to overthrow Russian President Vladimir Putin. He served over two years in prison for “hooliganism” involving violence on behalf of his NBP. He describes himself as an activist/reporter who was jailed briefly in Belarus in 2020, as his “reporting” seems to include various protest activities. His work for several years has been with MBK Media, founded and run by London billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and its “Open Russia” subgroup. (Khodorkovsky served prison time for financial scams that looted Russia.) Popkov also appears as part of Khodorkovsky’s “Free Russia Foundation.”
After getting kicked out of Belarus in 2021, Popkov moved from Russia to Kiev, working with “volunteer-activists” on an “action plan” against Russia, as he described it in a June 2022 interview with Kyiv Post. He says that his group of Russian emigrés in Kiev are “activists close to the Azov movement” of Andriy Biletsky (the man who designed the swastika-based insignia for the Azov Brigade he founded in 2014). Popkov means Biletsky’s “National Front” political vehicle, not the present-day Azov Regiment. Otherwise, Popkov says that he’s been reporting on the frontlines of the war on behalf of Warsaw’s Belsat Belarus-language operation.
There are presently unconfirmed reports that Popkov works for Ilya Ponomarev, a founder of the “Free Nations of Post-Russia” operation. Upon the assassination of Fomin yesterday, Ponomarev claimed that he knew the perpetrators, but “I’ll comment tomorrow, when we know the official position of the group which carried out this action.” Previously Ponomarev had announced that he was the public spokesman for the underground group that carried out the Moscow car bombing of Darya Dugina on Aug. 20, 2022, a group he called the “National Republican Army.”
