There’s a long list of people who want Alexander Dugin dead but when his car blew up on Saturday southwest of Moscow it was his daughter who perished inside. Early reports are often inaccurate, but it sounds like it was a real horror show.
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…
…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.
As for motive, it’s indisputably clear that Dugin is an advocate for reabsorbing Ukraine back into the Russian Empire, a bellicose view also espoused by his daughter. His influence over Putin is widely believed to be responsible for the bloodshed we’re seeing in Ukraine.
Dugin, a scathing critic of the United States who has close ties to the Kremlin, is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s Rasputin” or “Putin’s brain.” Although he doesn’t hold an official government position, and the extent of his direct relationship with Putin is not clear, Dugin has long called for the reabsorption of Ukraine into Russia — and experts say his language and expansionist views of Russia’s place in the world have been echoed by the Kremlin and in recent speeches by Putin.
The Ukrainians could be behind it, yet, there are plenty of Russians who have reason to be angry about the war, including the families of at least 20,000 (and possibly far more) Russian soldiers who have been killed in the conflict. There are even theories that Putin is behind the failed assassination, either because Dugin gave him bad advice or he so he can use it as a pretext and justification for retaliatory measures.
Ukrainian governmental officials strongly deny responsibility, and that counts for something. Often their denials are not very convincing by design. They see the advantage in ambiguity. In this case, they don’t want the world or the Russians to believe they blew up a 29 year old woman on a Moscow highway. For one thing, the Americans would not stand behind that.
House Intelligence Chairman Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said on CNN’s State of the Union on that lawmakers have not been briefed on the incident or who was behind it. “There are so many factions and internecine warfare within Russian society, within the Russian government, anything is possible,” he said.
“I certainly hope that if it was an attack on either one of those people, that it was an internal Russian affair and it wasn’t something emanating from Ukraine. We have seen terrible war crimes by Russia against Ukraine and Russia should be held accountable. And I certainly would never want to see anything like an attack on civilians by Ukraine and hope that their representations are correct.”
It’s generous for Schiff to refer to Darya Dugin as a civilian, although it’s technically accurate:
In March, she was sanctioned by the United States as part of a list of Russian elites and Russian intelligence-directed disinformation outlets, alongside her father, who has been designated for sanctions since 2015. She was also sanctioned by the United Kingdom in July for her support of Russia’s invasion.
The U.K. Treasury Department described Dugina in its sanctions list as a “frequent and high-profile contributor of disinformation in relation to Ukraine and the Russian invasion of Ukraine on various online platforms.”
The U.S. Treasury Department, upon sanctioning Dugina, said she was the chief editor of a disinformation website called United World International, which had suggested that Ukraine would “perish” if it was admitted to NATO. The website was developed by a Russian political influence operation called “Project Lakhta,” which Treasury officials say has used fictitious online personas to interfere in U.S. elections since at least 2014.
No doubt, Russia will blame the attack on Ukraine irrespective of what they discover through their investigation. They are currently reeling from recent blows in Crimea. On Saturday, a drone slammed into the Crimean headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
The attack came after a series of blasts hit military depots and airbases in the annexed peninsula over the past week, hinting at a growing ability by Ukraine’s military or its backers to strike deep behind enemy lines.
Kyiv has stopped short of publicly claiming responsibility for the explosions, but a government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to disclose information about the strikes to journalists, confirmed to NBC News this week that pro-Ukrainian saboteurs were behind them.
The Guardian reports that the lack of security in Crimea is having a powerful psychological effect on the population there. The New York Times adds that it’s also causing some scathing criticism at home.
And as Ukrainian attacks mount in the strategically and symbolically important territory, the damage is beginning to put domestic political pressure on the Kremlin, with criticism and debate about the war increasingly being unleashed on social media and underscoring that even what the Russian government considers to be Russian territory is not safe.
On the social network Telegram, one of Russia’s best-known state television hosts, Vladimir Solovyov, shared a post describing the attacks in Crimea and in Russian regions near the Ukrainian border as “some kind of surrealism.”
“Are we fighting or what are we doing?” the post by a pro-Kremlin military blogger asked. “Tough, cardinal measures must be taken, every day we pay for half-measures with human lives.”
When we add all of this up, it’s easy to predict that Russia will drop “half-measures,” and go for something far worse. The death of Darya Dugin will probably serve as a rationale.
