The daughter of a far-right Russian ideologue commonly known as “Putin’s brain” for his supposed influence over the Russian president’s fascist views was killed in a car bombing outside Moscow late Saturday, triggering outraged calls for “revenge” from pro-Kremlin figures who blamed Ukraine for the blast.
Russia’s Investigative Committee confirmed that Darya Dugina, the daughter of Alexander Dugin, was killed when an explosive device “planted under the bottom of the car” detonated as she was driving. The committee described the explosion as a targeted hit that had been planned in advance, though they did not say if they believed Dugina herself had been the target.
Images of the blast were widely circulated on Telegram late Saturday by the news outlets Baza and 112, which reported that Dugin was meant to have been driving the vehicle but chose to use a different one at the last moment.
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Both Dugina and her father had attended a festival devoted to Russian culture just before the explosion where a series of pro-Kremlin pundits, including Dugin, delivered lectures on the importance of traditional Russian values. Investigators suspect that’s where someone was able to stick a bomb on the bottom of the car, but there were no CCTV cameras in the VIP parking area where the car was parked, according to the 112 news outlet, which cited law enforcement sources.
Dugina was reportedly behind the wheel for only 10 minutes before the explosion.
Dugin had reportedly been following right behind his daughter and had watched as her car exploded. Photos shared by Baza appeared to show Dugin distraught at the scene, holding his head in both hands as he stood in front of the fiery wreckage.
Investigators are reported to be viewing the explosion as a targeted hit that may have been meant for Dugin, a philosopher widely believed to be the chief architect of Vladimir Putin’s ideology of a “Russian World” and the driving force behind his aggression against Ukraine.
Dugin told investigators that both he and his daughter had received threats from “Ukrainian nationalists” recently, according to the pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda.
Darya Dugina had been outspoken in her support of Russia’s war against Ukraine. As evidence began to pile up in April of Russian war crimes in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Dugina argued in an interview that the slaughter of civilians had been staged, bizarrely claiming that the U.S. had chosen the city because in English the name sounds like “butcher.” She was also sanctioned by the U.S. government in March in connection with her role in a Kremlin-run influence operation known as Project Lakhta.
Investigators work at the site of a suspected car bomb attack that killed Darya Dugina, daughter of ultra-nationalist Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin, in the Moscow region, Russia August 21, 2022.
Investigative Committee of Russia/Handout via REUTERS / ReutersThe bombing immediately led pro-Kremlin pundits to call for Russian forces to spill more blood in Ukraine as retaliation for Dugina’s death, which they claimed Ukrainian forces were responsible for.
Denis Pushilin, the Russian proxy leader of Ukraine's occupied Donetsk, angrily blamed “terrorists of the Ukrainian regime” for the blast, writing on Telegram that they had been “trying to liquidate Alexander Dugin” but “blew up his daughter.”
“In loving memory of Darya, she is a true Russian girl,” Pushilin wrote.
Pro-Kremlin Telegram channels and social media pages similarly blamed Ukraine for the explosion and demanded a swift response from Russia, calling for strikes on Kyiv. Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT, appeared to echo those calls, writing on Telegram: “The centers of decision-making! The centers of decision-making! The centers of decision-making!”
Simonyan had previously suggested Russian forces didn’t go far enough in their strikes on Kyiv and called on defense officials to relentlessly bomb “the centers of decision-making” in the Ukrainian capital.
Ukraine has firmly denied involvement in the bombing.
“Ukraine clearly has nothing to do with yesterday’s bombing, because we are not a criminal state like the Russian Federation, and even more so not a terrorist state,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said in televised comments Sunday.
Putin’s close associate Alexander Dugin was reportedly set to travel in the car that blew up but he opted for another ride at the last minute. His daughter died in the bombing.
Investigative Committee of Russia/Handout via REUTERSSome experts argued that it would not have made sense for Ukraine to target Dugin and suggested the real culprits might be much closer to home.
“The blowing up of the car of the famous Russian fascist and ideologist of the Putin regime, Alexander Dugin, was organized, it seems, by the Russian security services,” said Yuri Felshtinsky, a historian and the author of the upcoming book Blowing Up Ukraine: The Return of Russian Terror and the Threat of World War III.
“The Ukrainian special services, involved in a deadly battle with the aggressor on the territory of Ukraine, are unlikely to be able to send their officers to Moscow to organize terrorist attacks there,” he told The Daily Beast.
Felshtinsky noted that “Dugin was a rather odious figure in the Russian nationalist movement” with major connections abroad and access to lots of money, potentially making him a target for many inside Russia. There could even, he said “be people in the Russian security services who, for one reason or another, are interested in eliminating him, even if we put aside the usual provocation, similar to the bombings of apartment buildings in September 1999 in Russia.”
(The 1999 bombings were officially blamed on Chechen terrorists, but some historians and Russian defectors like poisoned former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko argued the Russian security services had orchestrated the attacks to gin up public support for declaring war on the Chechen Republic and help Putin’s rise to power).
Felshtinsky said the bombing was also “on par” with other recent suspicious deaths of Russian businessmen abroad and past Kremlin-linked hits, noting that the “elimination of children together with their parents” is also a “familiar trademark of the Russian security services.”
Russian sociologist Igor Eidman voiced a similar theory on Facebook, arguing that the bombing would give Russian authorities an “excuse” to intensify “Putin’s terror” both inside Russia and against Ukraine.
The mounting calls in Russia for “revenge” against Ukraine come just three days before Ukraine will celebrate Independence Day, a holiday marked this year by widespread fears Russia will unleash devastating new attacks on Ukrainians to make up for the the Russian military’s own setbacks in the nearly six-month war.
All employees working in the Ukrainian capital’s government quarter have now been told to work from home this whole week, according to Ukrainska Pravda.
