Vladlen Tatarsky

Maxim Yuryevich Fomin (25 April 1982 – 2 April 2023), better known as Vladlen Tatarsky, was a Ukrainian-born Russian military blogger, propagandist, convicted bank robber, and participant in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Tatarsky was active as a propagandist for Russia and the separatist forces in Ukraine until he was assassinated in a bombing in Saint Petersburg in April 2023.

Prison and war Maxim Yuryevich Fomin was born in Makiivka, Donetsk Oblast, on 25 April 1982. He held Ukrainian and later Russian citizenship. He was of Tatar descent on the side of his mother, Ravilya Ibragimova. In 2011, he was imprisoned in Ukraine for bank robbery. and Russian satirist Victor Pelevin's 1999 novel, Generation "П", where the name of the protagonist is Vavilen Tatarsky (Babylen Tatarsky in the English translation). This Tatarsky is an advertising copywriter who is enlisted to write copy at an ad agency, where he adapts Western advertising to the "Russian mentality".

Reflecting on the war in Donbas, Fomin wrote that "thousands of Russian officers" had served in the region since October 2014, thereby contradicting the official Russian position that the Russian Federation was not involved militarily in mainland Ukraine before 2022. Tatarsky lived in Moscow from 2019 until his death in 2023.

As a blogger, Tatarsky called for more attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure which would result in more Ukrainian casualties. In one infamous video, he was recorded saying, "We'll defeat everyone, we'll kill everyone, we'll rob everyone we need to. Everything will be the way we like it." The video was recorded at the Kremlin, to which Tatarsky had been invited to attend Putin's announcement of "partial mobilization" on 30 September 2022.

Due to his views and involvement in the conflict, Tatarsky was sanctioned by Ukraine. His death was caught on video. Twenty-four others were injured, six of them critically, according to Russian authorities. A Saint Petersburg resident, Darya Trepova, was considered a suspect by the Investigative Committee of Russia. According to investigators, she had brought to the café a box with a bust of Tatarsky, in which an explosive device was hidden.

Following the incident, Margarita Simonyan, Tina Kandelaki, and Anton Krasovsky blamed Ukraine for the attack and called for retaliation. Prigozhin suggested that Ukrainian state actors are not responsible, and Ukrainian Mykhailo Podolyak attributed the bombing to Russia.

The burial took place on 8 April 2023 at Moscow's Troyekurovskoye Cemetery.

In July 2023, it was reported that a new militia bearing Tatarsky's name saw combat around the town of New York, Ukraine.