Several hundred people, including the leader of the paramilitary group Wagner, gathered in Moscow on Saturday for the funeral of a famous Russian military blogger supporting the attack in Ukraine and killed last week in a bomb attack.
According to journalists from Agence France-Presse (AFP) on the spot, hundreds of people went to the Troyekurovskoye cemetery in the west of the capital to gather in front of the coffin of Maxime Fomin before his burial.
A large police force has been deployed, with careful control of people going to the cemetery. Many of them wore clothes marked with a Z or a V, signs of their support for the offensive in Ukraine.
This assassination is “an attempt to kill the truth […] who is trying to pierce the layer of rot that covers Russian society,” Anna Ivannikova, a 33-year-old Moscow manager who came with flowers, told AFP.
According to her, Russian society is “still sleeping”, except in the Russian cities closest to Ukraine, where fighting has been raging for more than a year.
On April 2, Maxime Fomin, known by the pseudonym of Vladlen Tatarskiï, was killed in an attack during an event in a café in Saint Petersburg (north) linked to the leader of the paramilitary group Wagner, Evguéni Prigojine.
The Russian authorities have arrested and charged with “terrorism” a 26-year-old woman, Daria Trepova, who admitted having offered the blogger a booby-trapped statuette, which exploded during this event, killing him and injuring around 30 people.
Ms. Trepova, however, has not yet claimed to have participated voluntarily in the attack, nor mentioned possible sponsors.
“War of Annihilation”
Moscow has accused kyiv and “agents” of imprisoned Russian opponent Alexei Navalny of being involved in the assassination. Ukraine, for its part, said that it was an internal settling of accounts in the circles supporting the offensive in Russia.
Pro-Ukrainian Russian activists also claimed, without concrete evidence, that it was the action of a resistance group operating in Russia.
Be that as it may, this incredible assassination, with still vague contours, illustrates the spread in Russia of violence linked to the conflict, which now strikes far from the front. In August, Daria Douguina, the daughter of a famous pro-Kremlin ideologue, was also killed in a bomb attack near Moscow.
“Vladlen Tatarsky will stay with us, his voice will continue to resonate,” Yevgeny Prigojine said Saturday at the cemetery, quoted by the Russian news agency Ria Novosti.
Maxime Fomin was one of the best-known pro-Kremlin military bloggers with over 500,000 subscribers on Telegram.
The influence of these activists, who publish reports with Russian forces in Ukraine and share sometimes critical analyzes of the conduct of operations, has increased sharply since the start of the offensive in February 2022.
“I had a lot of friends in common with the deceased”, testifies to AFP Alexei Sobolev, 45, who came to the funeral on Saturday and who presents himself as a volunteer who has fought since 2014 with the pro-Russian separatists of the eastern Ukraine.
Originally from Donbass, Maxime Fomin also joined the troops of the pro-Russian separatists in this region in 2014.
“We are the militiamen of the first wave, there are not very many of us anymore”, notes Mr. Sobolev, assuring that a “war of annihilation” is targeting Russia, but that the Russian army is in the process of be “made over again”.