Wagner chief mourned the murdered Russian blogger

A large photograph of Tatarsky held up in a cemetery in front of mourners Photo: EPA

Hundreds of Russians lined up at a Moscow cemetery on Saturday to mourn Vladlen Tatarsky, a murdered Kremlin propagandist killed by a bomb hidden in a golden bust of himself.

A video released by Russian state media shows piles of red carnations placed on Tatarsky's grave as mourners silently walk past. Many were in tears.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Kremlin's Wagner mercenary group, also placed a sledgehammer, the unofficial calling card of 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,” Prigogine later said in this Telegram channel.

Security was tight and people had to walk through metal detectors to join the slow moving queue. They typically wore black and remained silent as they marched forward to pay their respects to their hero less than a week after he was murdered in a bar in St. Petersburg.

Many of the mourners wore badges, openly supporting Wagner and carrying Z and V are military symbols.

Prigogine (in the center) put down the sledgehammer, 'visiting card' for his mercenary army. Photo: REUTERS

There was no representative from the Kremlin, although Vladimir Putin posthumously awarded Tatarsky a medal for courage.

Earlier, a military brass band played during the transfer of Tatarsky's coffin to the prestigious Troekurovsky cemetery. Russian special forces soldiers in balaclavas and with machine guns guarded the coffin, and after he was buried, soldiers in full dress saluted Tatarsky with cannons and rifles.

Tatarsky was one of the Kremlin's most influential military bloggers, posting videos and candid reports from the front lines in Ukraine.

He became the second pro-war Kremlin propagandist to be killed since Putin ordered his full-scale invasion last February, and his murder shocked his fans.

“At first I didn’t believe that Tatarsky was killed,&# 34; — a woman named Alexander told the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, sobbing. "He was a man with the biggest soul, and this allowed the enemy to get close to him"

The police arrested a 26-year-old woman for his murder. Darya Trepova admitted that she smuggled the bust into a St. Petersburg bar where Tatarsky performed, but she also said she didn't know it contained a bomb.

Russian prosecutors blamed not only the Ukrainian intelligence services, but other commentators said that the murder of Tatarsky could have been orchestrated by the FSB as a warning to Mr. Prigozhin.