Time.news – Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin, was more than a military blogger in Russia: with 560,000 followers on Telegram, he was the war correspondent who had reported on the ‘special operation’ in Ukraine from the front, fueling support at home but also repeatedly criticizing the generals and the inefficiency of the armed forces.
Considered close to the head of Wagner’s Russian mercenaries, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in a video posted by the Kremlin last year, he greeted the invasion of Ukraine by promising: “We will defeat anyone, we will kill anyone, we will rob anyone if necessary. Just the way we like it.”
Once on the front line, however, he had focused on the errors in the Russian advance, without calling into question the objective of the operation.
“Until we find out the name of this military genius who positioned the tactical battalion by the river, and he does not answer publicly for this, there will be no reforms in the army,” he warned in one of his very popular posts.
The pseudonym “Vladlen Tatarsky” was taken from the name of the creative Muscovite protagonist of “Generation”, a visionary 1999 novel by Viktor Pelevin, which talks about consumerism, drugs and Mesopotamian mythology.
He already had experience in the war in Donbass from 2014 to 2015, following the Donetsk separatists.
In September Tatarsky was among the hundreds invited to the lavish ceremony organized by the Kremlin to proclaim the Russian annexation of four partially occupied regions of Ukraine.