Hundreds of Muscovites came to the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery in the Russian capital on Saturday to pay their last respects to propagandist military blogger Maxim Fomin, aka Vladlen Tatarsky, who was killed in a bomb attack on 2 April. Tatarsky was laid to rest with military honors. According to images posted on social networks, the well-known right-wing nationalist blogger's coffin was followed by a guard of honor at the funeral. After Tatarsky's remains were buried to the sound of a military orchestra, salvos were fired into the sky. His decorations were received posthumously from authorities and were placed near the coffin, including the Russian state Order of Courage, awarded to him by Vladimir Putin one day after his assassination. The head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, attended the funeral, but did so before the public arrived, according to Russian media. The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia leader Leonid Slutsky was also present. At the same time, several independent media denounced the impossibility of gaining access to the burial site to cover the funeral. Tatarsky was killed in a bomb attack last Sunday, April 2, in St Petersburg, where he was giving a talk to dozens of his social media followers. The bar where he was killed is said to have belonged to Prigozhin. Nearly 40 people were injured in the blast, which the authorities described as a terrorist attack orchestrated by Ukrainian special services and the Russian opposition. Ukrainian authorities denied involvement, claiming that the assassination was a part of the infighting between different factions in Russia. The alleged perpetrator of the attack, a young Russian woman identified as Daria Trepova, was arrested the same day and charged with terrorism. Tatarsky, 40, was born in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. In 2011, he was sentenced to time in prison for a bank robbery. When the war in the Donbas broke out in 2014, he managed to escape and fought on the side of the Moscow-backed separatists against the Kyiv army. After the start of the Russian war campaign in February 2022, he became infamous as part of a small group of extremist bloggers who quickly became an alternative to state-run media, but also a series of extremist statements suggesting that all means were valid for Moscow, regardless of the number of possible Ukrainian civilian casualties. His propagandistic commentary propelled him to relative popularity, and Tatarsky featured more prominently as a guest and host of political shows on state television and a writer for RT. — Euronews
