Police opened a criminal case on charges of justifying terrorism over two posts, from 2022 and 2023, a source in law enforcement told the St. Petersburg Telegram channel Rotonda. One of the publications, it is alleged, was about the bombing of a St. Petersburg cafe in which the pro-war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky was killed.
In that post, according to sources, the author wrote about the "glorious traditions of Petrograd bombism" and celebrated that the blast occurred in a "branded Prigozhin cafe." According to the channel 78 and TASS, in other publications Serebrovsky called on Russian soldiers to surrender and desert and "spoke in favor of ending the existence of Russia."
Rotonda identified the detainee as Vladimir Serebrovsky, administrator of the Rotten Kepken channel. Security forces came with a search warrant to an apartment on Kanonerskaya Street, where the blogger, according to TASS, had organized his own editorial office. The channels obtained video of the door being broken down and a person whose face is not visible being detained.
Serebrovsky kept a blog on LiveJournal and later on Telegram under the nickname Rotten Kepken. He commented on politics from a left-liberal position, opposed the war in Ukraine and criticized right-wing and nationalist forces in various countries. The last post on his channel was published the night before his detention.
Rotonda noted that members of the "Russian Community" chat published the blogger's personal data and address, and that pro-government activists wondered why no case had yet been opened against him. The right-wing Telegram channels "Mnogonatsional" and "Russian Community" had called for Serebrovsky to be prosecuted. The journalist Edward Chesnokov called him a "seasoned supporter of the Nazis," and the publicist Yegor Kholmogorov called him a "high-ranking provocateur."
Vladlen Tatarsky died on the evening of April 2, 2023, in an explosion at a cafe in central St. Petersburg. Daria Trepova, a St. Petersburg resident, brought a statuette with a hidden bomb into the cafe and was sentenced to 27 years in a penal colony. The FSB named Ukrainian citizen Yuri Denisov as the organizer of the killing.