Wagner chief leads mourning for murdered Kremlin blogger
‘He is a soldier who stays with us, whose voice will always live and speak only the truth’
HUNDREDS of Russians queued at a Moscow cemetery yesterday to mourn Vladlen Tatarsky, the murdered Kremlin propagandist, killed by a bomb hidden in a golden bust of himself.
Video released by state media showed piles of red carnations placed on Tatarsky’s grave as mourners quietly filed past. Many were in tears.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Kremlin’s Wagner mercenary group, had also placed a sledgehammer, an unofficial calling card for his semi-private army, next to the grave. “He is a soldier who stays with us, whose voice will always live and speak only the truth,” Mr Prigozhin said later.
Security was tight and people had to pass through metal detectors to join the slow-moving queue.
They generally wore black and were silent as they shuffled forward to pay homage to Tatarsky, 40, less than a week after he was killed in a St Petersburg bar.
Many of the mourners wore badges openly supporting Wagner and bearing the Z and V pro-war symbols. A large photograph of Tatarsky was also carried in the procession. There was no representative from the Kremlin, although Vladimir Putin has posthumously awarded Tatarsky a medal for bravery.
Earlier, a military brass band had played as the coffin was carried into the Troyekurovskoye cemetery.
Russian special forces soldiers, wearing balaclavas and carrying machine guns, guarded the coffin and after he had been buried.
Tatarsky was given a cannon and a rifle salute by soldiers who attended in full ceremonial dress.
He was one of the most influential of the Kremlin’s military bloggers, who post videos and spittle-flecked reports from the front lines in Ukraine. He was the second pro-war Kremlin propagandist to be killed since Mr Putin ordered his full-scale invasion in February last
‘He was a man with the biggest soul and this allowed the enemy to get so close to him’
year and his murder has shocked his fans. “At first I did not believe that Tatarsky had been killed,” a woman called Alexandre told the Komsomolets newspaper as she sobbed. “He was a man with the biggest soul and this allowed the enemy to get so close to him.”
Police have arrested a 26-year-old woman for his murder.
She has admitted to carrying the bust into the St Petersburg bar where Tatarsky was giving his talk but she also said that she did not know it contained a bomb.
Russian prosecutors have blamed Ukrainian secret services but other commentators have said that the FSB may have organised Tatarsky’s murder as a warning to Mr Prigozhin.