According to AFP journalists on the spot, hundreds of people went to the Troyekurovskoye cemetery in the west of the capital to pay their respects in front of the coffin of Maxim Fomin before his burial.
A large police force was deployed on the spot with careful control of people going to the cemetery. Many of them wore clothes with a Z or V stamped as signs of their support for the offensive in Ukraine.
Moscow has accused Kiev and "agents" of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny of being involved in the assassination. Ukraine, for its part, said that it was an internal settling of scores in the circles supporting the offensive in Russia.
"Vladlen Tatarskiy will stay with us, his voice will continue to resonate," Prigozhin said Saturday from the cemetery, quoted by Russia's Ria Novosti news agency.
Maxime Fomin was one of the best-known pro-Kremlin military bloggers with more than 500,000 followers on Telegram. The influence of these activists who publish reports with the Russian military in Ukraine and share their analyses has increased sharply since the offensive began in February 2022.
Russian police officers inspect a café where a bomb killed one person and injured 25 others, on April 2, 2023 in St. © Petersburg Olga MALTSEVA / AFP/Archives
"I had a lot of friends in common with the deceased," said Alexei Sobolev, 45, who came to the funeral on Saturday and presented himself as a volunteer who had fought since 2014 with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Originally from Donbass, Maxime Fomin also joined the troops of pro-Russian separatists in 2014.
"We are the militiamen of the first wave, we are no longer very numerous," said Sobolev, assuring that a "war of annihilation" targets Russia but that the Russian army is being "remade again".
© 2023 AFP