Several hundred people, including the leader of the paramilitary group Wagner, gathered in Moscow on Saturday for the funeral of Vladlen Tatarki, a well-known pro-war blogger, who was recently killed in an explosion in a cafe in St. Petersburg.

Russian deputy Leonid Slutsky at the funeral of military blogger Vladlen TatarskyiPhoto: TASS / ddp USA / Profimedia

Hundreds of people flocked to the Troekurovsky cemetery in the west of the Russian capital to carry the coffin of Maxim Fomin, a blogger known as Vladlen Tatarki, News.ro reported. There was a significant police presence and people were closely monitored on their way to the cemetery. Many of them were wearing clothes with the letter Z or V, signs of support for the offensive against Ukraine.

At the funeral, deputy Leonid Slutsky again demanded the return of the death penalty in Russia, and mercenaries from the “Wagner” PMC instead of funeral grass placed a sledgehammer on his coffin – a symbol of the strength and stability of the company. There is a famous video in which a “traitor” from the ranks of Wagner is executed with sledgehammer blows.

Last Sunday, Vladlen Tatarsky was killed in an explosion in a cafe in St. Petersburg owned by the leader of the Wagner paramilitary group Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Moscow accused Kyiv and the “agents” of imprisoned opposition leader Oleksiy Navalny of complicity in this murder. Ukraine, for its part, claimed that this was an internal settlement of accounts between those who support the attack on Russia.

“Vladlen Tatarsky will remain with us, his voice will be heard,” Yevhen Prigozhin said at the cemetery on Saturday, according to the Russian news agency RIA.

Who was video blogger Tatarsky

Maxim Fomin was one of the most famous pro-Kremlin military bloggers, over 500,000 people subscribed to his Telegram channel.

The influence of these activists, who publish stories about Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine and share their own analysis of the situation on the front lines, has grown significantly since the start of the Russian offensive in February 2022. Although some criticize the way the operation in Ukraine and the Russian military leadership are set up, they always avoid direct criticism of Vladimir Putin.

Tatarsky, 40, was among those who publicly urged Russia to continue the war even more aggressively. For example, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Kherson after Russia withdrew from the city last November, Tatarsky wondered why Moscow did not risk killing him with a drone.

Originally from Donbas, Maksym Fomin had war experience, because in 2014 he joined the forces of pro-Russian separatists.

  • Read also: Footage of tortured and killed prisoners, enemies – “latent homosexuals”, “schizophrenics”, “pigs” – what the Russians who followed the video blogger Tatarsky found out

He was killed last Sunday in an explosion in a cafe in St. Petersburg during a conference in front of an audience of about 100 people. More than 30 of them were injured as a result of the attack. The event was organized by a group called “Cyber​​​​​​Z Front”, the name of which refers to the letter “Z”, which Russia adopted as a symbol of war. According to Russian media reports, the explosion occurred minutes after the woman presented Tatarsky with a statuette, a bust she said she made herself, representing Tatarsky. 26-year-old Daria Trepova from St. Petersburg was arrested and charged with terrorism, but the woman claims that she was lured into a trap and did not know that the statuette contained a bomb.

Tatarsky is the second known war propagandist to be killed in Russia since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The first was the journalist Daria Dugin, daughter of the famous ultra-nationalist activist Oleksandr Dugin. Last August, Daria Dugina died in a car trap near Moscow.

The killings are an attack on Russia’s hard-line pro-war camp and appear to be a warning to other members that they could be targeted anywhere. Tatarsky had close ties to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner’s mercenary group fighting on Russia’s side in Ukraine, who was also a frequent critic of the Russian Defense Ministry.

  • Read also: Putin posthumously awarded a Russian military blogger killed in a terrorist attack

___

  • Follow the latest events of the war in Ukraine LIVETEXT on HotNews.ro