“Everything, we will defeat everyone. We will kill everyone, we will rob everyone who needs to be robbed.”

Vladlen Tatarsky

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Vladlen Tatarsky (born Maxim Fomin) was a Russian military blogger and propagandist.

Tatarsky was born in 1982 in Makiivka, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine.

 In 2011, he was jailed for bank robbery.

 When in 2014 the War in Donbas (2014–2022) started, he escaped from jail and joined the military forces of the Russian-backed "Donetsk People's Republic".

 According to Tatarsky's own words, he was jailed again but eventually pardoned by Alexander Zakharchenko, the head of the republic, and was allowed to fight against the Ukrainian army. Eventually, he started blogging, took the pen name Vladlen Tatarsky, and since 2019 he was living in Moscow.

Telegram Channel

Tatarsky, who had more than 560 thousand followers on Telegram, belonged to so-called Russian military bloggers, a group of hardline bloggers who fully supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine and criticized Vladimir Putin and Russian military commanders for being too soft. At one point, he strongly supported the attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, motivating this by saying that the attacks will lead to more Ukrainians dead. Tatarsky commonly referred to Ukraine as a "terrorist state". He was sanctioned by Ukraine; he was forbidden from entering Ukraine for ten years, and his possible assets in Ukraine were confiscated.

Death

Tatarsky was killed in an explosion on April 2, 2023 while hosting an event at a cafe in St. Petersburg. The cafe where it took place was reportedly owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin. The incident has been confirmed by the RIA Novosti news agency.