War in Ukraine: a pro-Russian blogger killed in a terrorist attack was buried in the presence of the head of Wagner

With over 500,000 subscribers on Telegram, Maxim Fomin was one of the most prominent pro-Kremlin military bloggers. He was killed last week in a bomb blast. At his funeral this Saturday in Moscow, at the Troekurovsky cemetery, several hundred people gathered, including the leader of the Wagner paramilitary group Yevgeny Prigozhin.

A large police force was deployed, closely monitoring people going to the cemetery. Many of them wore clothes with the letters Z or V, signs of support for the advance into Ukraine.

This murder is “an attempt to kill the truth (…) that is trying to break through the layer of rot that covers Russian society,” assured Anna Ivannikova, 33, a Moscow manager who came with flowers. According to her, Russian society is “still asleep”, with the exception of the Russian cities closest to Ukraine, where hostilities have been raging for more than a year.

Blurred Murder

On April 2, Maxim Fomin, known under the pseudonym Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed in an attack during an event in a cafe in St. Petersburg (North), linked to the leader of the Wagner paramilitary group Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Russian authorities arrested and charged “terrorism” 26-year-old Daria Trepova, who admitted to offering a booby-trapped statuette to a blogger that exploded during the event, killing him and injuring about 30 people. However, Daria Trepova has not yet announced her voluntary participation in the attack and has not mentioned possible sponsors.

Moscow has accused Kyiv and “agents” of Russia’s imprisoned opponent Alexei Navalny of involvement in the assassination. Ukraine, for its part, said it was an internal settling of scores in circles backing the offensive in Russia. Pro-Ukrainian Russian activists also claimed, without concrete evidence, that this was an action by a resistance group operating in Russia.

Originally from Donbass.

Be that as it may, this improbable murder with still unclear contours illustrates the spread of conflict-related violence in Russia, which now strikes far from the front. In August, Daria Dugina, the daughter of a prominent pro-Kremlin ideologue, was also killed in a bomb blast near Moscow.

“Vladlen Tatarsky will remain with us, his voice will continue to sound,” Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Saturday at the cemetery, quoted by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti. The influence of these activists, who publish reports on Russian forces in Ukraine and sometimes share critiques of the conduct of operations, has risen sharply since the offensive began in February 2022.

“I had many mutual friends with the deceased,” testified Oleksiy Sobolev, 45, who attended the funeral and posed as a volunteer who has been fighting pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine since 2014. A native of Donbass, Maksim Fomin also joined the pro-Russian separatists in 2014.

“We are the militias of the first wave, there aren’t very many of us anymore,” Sobolev noted, assuring that a “war of annihilation” is going on against Russia, and the Russian army is being “remade again.”