• Russia Attack in St. Petersburg kills well-known Russian nationalist blogger
  • Attack Suspect arrested in murder of pro-Russian blogger in St. Petersburg

Hundreds of people, including the leader of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, gathered 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 St. Petersburg.

According to AFP journalists, hundreds of people gathered at the Troyekurovskoye cemetery in the west of the capital in front of the coffin of Maxim Fomin, known by the pseudonym Vladlen Tatarsky, before his burial.

The act took place in the middle of a strong police device. Many of the attendees wore clothes 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 Kiev and "agents" of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny of involvement in the killing. Ukraine said the crime was an internal reckoning among circles supporting the Russian military operation.

"Vladlen Tatarsky will remain with us, his voice will continue to resonate," Prigozhin said Saturday from the cemetery, according to the Russian press agency Ria Novosti.

Hundreds of Persians bid farewell to the Russian blogger. EFE

Russian authorities arrested and charged a 26-year-old woman, Daria Trepova, with "terrorism," who admitted to giving the blogger an explosive statuette. Trepova did not immediately say he had voluntarily participated in the attack, nor did he mention who had commissioned it.

In any case, the crime, of which many aspects are still unknown, illustrates the spread in Russia, and many miles from the front, of violence linked to the conflict. In August, Daria Duguina, 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 country's best-known pro-Kremlin military bloggers, 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 increased considerably since the start of the Russian offensive in February 2022.

"He had many friends in common with the deceased," Alexei Sobolev, 45, who came to the funeral and said he had been fighting with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine since 2014, told AFP.

Originally from Donbas in eastern Ukraine, Maxim Fomin also joined pro-Russian separatist troops in 2014.

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