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The Independent UK
The Independent UK
National
Sravasti Dasgupta and Maryam Zakir-Hussain

Ukraine news – live: Zelensky condemns Russia’s UN Security Council presidency as ‘absurd’

AP

Related video: Russia arrests US journalist on espionage allegations

A prominent pro-Putin military blogger has died and more than a dozen other people were injured when a bomb went off in a cafe in the Russian city of St Petersburg.

Russian news reports said blogger Vladlen Tatarsky - real name Maxim Fomin - was killed and 15 people were hurt in the explosion at the Street Bar cafe in the country’s second largest city.

Tatarsky was one of the most prominent of the influential military bloggers who have provided an often critical running commentary on Russia’s war in Ukraine.

He was meeting with members of the public at the cafe and a woman presented him with a statuette that apparently exploded, according to local reports.

It comes after six civilians were killed and eight wounded in Russian shelling of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine on Sunday morning, a senior Ukrainian official has said.

Kostiantynivka, home to about 70,000 people before the war, is just 12.5 miles west of Bakhmut, the epicentre of fighting for at least eight months as Russian forces try to capture the city.

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