Hundreds of people, including the leader of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, gathered this Saturday in Moscow for the funeral of a well-known military blogger who supported the offensive in Ukraine and died last Sunday in an attack in Saint Petersburg.
According to AFP journalists, hundreds of people gathered at the Troyekurovskoye cemetery, in the west of the capital, before the coffin of Maxim Fomin, known by the pseudonym Vladlen Tatarsky, before his burial.
The act took place in the midst of a strong police device. Many of the attendees wore garments with a Z or a V, symbols of support for the military campaign in Ukraine.
Last Sunday, Tatarsky was killed in a bomb attack on a St. Petersburg cafe belonging to the head of the Wagner paramilitary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Moscow accused kyiv and "agents" of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny of involvement in the assassination. Ukraine said in turn that the crime was an internal reckoning among circles that support the Russian military operation.
"Vladlen Tatarsky will continue with us, his voice will continue to resound," Prigozhin declared this Saturday from the cemetery, according to statements collected by the Russian press agency Ria Novosti.
The Russian authorities detained and accused of "terrorism" a 26-year-old woman, Daria Trepova, who admitted giving the blogger an explosive statuette. Trepova did not claim for the moment to have voluntarily participated in the attack, nor did she mention who would have commissioned it.
In any case, the crime, of which many aspects are still unknown, illustrates the spread in Russia, and many kilometers from the front, of violence linked to the conflict. In August, Daria Dugina, the daughter of a well-known ideologue close to the Kremlin, was killed in a bomb attack near Moscow.
Maxim Fomin was one of the best-known pro-Kremlin military bloggers in the country, with more than 500,000 subscribers to his Telegram account. The influence of these activists who publish reports with the Russian military in Ukraine and share their analysis has increased considerably since the start of the Russian offensive in February 2022.
"I had a lot of mutual friends with the deceased," Alexei Sobolev, 45, who came to the funeral and says he has been fighting with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine since 2014, told AFP.
Originally from Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, Maxim Fomin also joined the troops of pro-Russian separatists in 2014.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
