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What did 2 April 2023 bring to the war's edges?
Summary
A bombing in Saint Petersburg and diplomatic moves in the days before marked the period around 2 April 2023.
What was happening around the edges of the war on 2 April 2023? That day, Russian pro-government war correspondent Vladlen Tatarsky was killed by a bombing at a café in Saint Petersburg owned by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin. Sixteen other people were injured.
The attack took place inside Russia, in a venue tied to Prigozhin, and it was listed among the western Russia attacks of the period.
The days before
The preceding week brought developments in several capitals. On 27 March 2023, a Russian missile strike on Sloviansk, in Donetsk Oblast, killed at least two civilians and injured 29 others.
On the same day, the National Assembly of Hungary voted 182–6 to approve Finland's accession to NATO. That left Turkey as the last remaining NATO member yet to approve Finland's membership.
On 30 March 2023, lawmakers from the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria walked out of the lower house of Austria's parliament during a speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. They said they were protesting against a violation of Austria's national principle of neutrality.
A wider picture
Taken together, these events show the war reaching beyond the front line: missile strikes on a Ukrainian city, a bombing in a Russian one, and political arguments in European parliaments over how far to engage with Kyiv and with NATO enlargement.
