Hundreds of people, including the leader of Russia's Wagner military group , took part in the funeral of a famous military blogger who strongly supported the attack on Ukraine and who was recently killed in a cafe explosion in St. Petersburg, on Saturday.

Hundreds headed to Troyekurovskoye cemetery in the west of the capital to pay their respects in front of Maxim Fomin's coffin, before his burial, according to AFP correspondents at the scene.

A large number of police officers were deployed at the site. They searched those entering the cemetery, and a large number of them wore clothes with the letter Z or V printed on them, indicating their support for the attack in Ukraine.

Last Sunday, Fomin, better known as Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed in an explosion in a St. Petersburg café owned by the head of the Wagner Military Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Moscow has accused Kiev of having arranged, in collusion with supporters of the imprisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, the attack. Ukraine, for its part, suggested that the attack was the result of "internal terrorism" caused by rivalries within the Russian regime.

"Vladlen Tatarsky will remain with us, and his voice will continue to resonate," Prigozhin was quoted as saying by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti on Saturday from the cemetery.

Vladlen Tatassky, 40, was well known in military circles in Russia , with more than half a million subscribers to his Telegram channel. His popularity on Telegram increased, especially since he published, since the start of the Russian attack on Ukraine, video clips analyzing the field situation and giving advice to soldiers.

"I had a lot of common friends with the deceased," said Alexei Sobolev, 45, who attended the funeral on Saturday and identified himself as a volunteer fighting since 2014 with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Fomin, who was born in Ukraine's Donbass region, fought on the side of pro-Moscow separatist forces in eastern Ukraine at the start of the war in 2014.

Sobolev added, "We fighters from the first wave are no longer numerous," stressing that a "war of annihilation" is targeting Russia, but the Russian army is in the process of "reconfiguring itself."