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Daria Dugina, daughter of Russian politologist Alexander Dugin, was killed near Russia’s capital
The daughter of Alexander Dugin, a Russian nationalist and self-styled philosopher whose ideas helped shape the Kremlin’s narrative about Ukraine, was killed in a car explosion near Moscow on Saturday night. In a statement Monday, he called for “more than just revenge.”
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The incident is already creating a flash point in the war, as Russia on Monday officially blamed Ukraine for the attack, claiming it was planned by “special services” and carried out by a Ukrainian woman who then fled to Estonia with her daughter. Ukraine denied any involvement.
Car explosion kills daughter of key Putin ally Alexander Dugin, Russia says
Daria Dugina,29, was driving her father’s car from a festival they both attended when theblastoccurred, engulfing the car in flames. Some outside analysts and friends of the family suspect that Dugin was the real target. Dugina, the chief editor of a Russian disinformation website who was herself under U.S. sanctions, had also been deeply supportive of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine.
Here’s what to know about the explosion and what it means for the war in Ukraine.
Car explosion kills daughter of key Putin ally, Russia says
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Video shows the aftermath of a car explosion near Moscow where Russia's Investigative Committee claims the daughter of Putin ally Alexander Dugin was killed. (Video: Twitter)
What to know
- Who is Alexander Dugin?
- Who is Daria Dugina, his daughter?
- Was the car explosion an orchestrated attack?
- What does this mean for Russia’s war with Ukraine?
- How rare are car bombings in Russia and Ukraine?
Who is Alexander Dugin?
Return to menuDugin, a scathing critic of the United States who has been on its sanctions list since 2015, has often been credited with influencing the Kremlin’s thinking on Russian expansion and Ukraine, although his links to Putin have been sometimes overstated and the extent of their direct relationship is unclear. Dugin doesn’t hold an official government position.
Russian nationalist Alexander Dugin gestures as he addresses the “Battle for Donbas” rally in support of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, in Moscow, on Oct. 18, 2014 (Moscow News Agency/Reuters)
Dugin, who has theorized about a perpetual war between Russia and the West for decades, has long called for the reabsorption of Ukraine into Russia. 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. He was active in breakaway regions in the 2008 Russia-Georgia war and in 2014 in Ukraine, where U.S. officials say he recruited individuals with military and combat experience to fight on behalf of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. The separatist enclave in eastern Ukraine has played a central role in Putin’s justification of the war.
Dugin also controls Geopolitica, “a website that serves as a platform for Russian ultra-nationalists to spread disinformation and propaganda targeting Western and other audiences,” according to U.S. Treasury officials. The website has accused the United States and NATO of provoking war with Russia to “further terrorize the American people in all sorts of malicious ways.”
Who is Daria Dugina, his daughter?
Return to menuDugina, a Russian political commentator and the chief editor of a disinformation website called United World International, had also spoken publicly in support of the war in Ukraine and Russian expansion. The site, as one example, suggested Ukraine would “perish” if it was admitted to NATO. In March, she was added to a list of Russian elites and Russian intelligence-directed disinformation outlets sanctioned by the United States. The British government also put sanctions on Dugina this year.
In an interview with a Russian YouTuber in March, Dugina said that Ukrainian identity is mostly localized in western Ukraine, and that eastern Ukraine — including the Donbas region — was likely to accept a “Eurasian Empire” on the basis of religious faith and nationality.
In April, she argued that the slaughter of civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha — which sparked calls for a war crimes probe — was staged and portrayed it as an anti-Russian smear campaign. Officials in Bucha say upward of 450 people died while Russian forces held the town — and 419 bodies were found with markings suggesting they had been shot, tortured or bludgeoned to death.
Accounting of bodies in Bucha nears completion
Was the car explosion an orchestrated attack?
Return to menuRussia’s internal security service, the FSB, claimed Monday in a statement to Russian media that the car explosion that killed Dugina was orchestrated by “Ukrainian special services” and carried out by a Ukrainian woman before she fled to Estonia with her young daughter. The FSB said the Ukrainian national and her daughter both attended the same festival as Dugina and her father and were renting an apartment in Moscow near where she lived. The Washington Post could not confirm the claims.
Russia blames Ukraine for car explosion that killed Putin ally’s daughter
Russia’s Investigative Committee previously said it opened a criminal murder case after a Toyota Land Cruiser “went off at full speed on a public highway” and caught fire, after an “explosive device planted under the bottom of the car on the driver’s side” blew up. The driver, identified by the committee as “journalist and political scientist Daria Dugina,” died at the scene.
Investigators were dispatched and seized evidence, including dash-cam footage, while an explosives expert examined the burned car in a specialized parking lot. “Taking into account the data already obtained, the investigation believes that the crime was pre-planned and a murder for hire,” the committee said in a statement.
Investigators inspect scene of deadly crash
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Investigators inspected the scene of a car explosion, in which the daughter of key Putin ally Alexander Dugin died Aug. 20, according to Russia. (Video: Reuters)
Andrey Krasnov, a friend of Dugin’s, told the Russian state media outlet Tass that he believed her father was the target of an attack, “or maybe the two of them.” Daria “was driving another car but she took his car today,” he said.
What does this mean for Russia’s war with Ukraine?
Return to menuThe incident is already creating a new flash point, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned of possible Russian escalations of attacks ahead of the country’s independence day. In the wake of the explosion, Denis Pushilin, a prominent separatist leader and key figure in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, immediately blamed Ukraine for Dugina’s death, without providing any evidence.
Ukrainian officials denied any involvement in the blast and suggested it could be the result of an internal dispute within Russia. “We certainly had nothing to do with it,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser Zelensky, said Sunday on Ukrainian television. Ukrainian officials distanced themselves from the incident in interviews with The Washington Post.
Andrii Yusov, spokesman for Ukraine’s chief directorate of military intelligence, told The Post that they would not comment on the incident. Still, Yusov noted that “I can say that the process of internal destruction of the ‘Russky Mir,’ or ‘the Russian world,’ has begun,” and predicted that “the Russian world will eat and devour itself from the inside.”
Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry, said Sunday that if Ukraine were found to have been involved in Dugina’s death, “we should talk about the policy of state terrorism implemented by the Kyiv regime.” She said Pushilin’s allegations “must be verified by the competent authorities.”
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The explosion set off a wave of speculation by analysts that it could also have been an internal attack by those dissatisfied with the war’s course. “The origin [of the attack] is obviously internal, not external,” Nicolas Tenzer, who has served in the French government as a senior civil servant and is an expert in international security, tweeted Sunday.
House Intelligence Chairman Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday 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.
Schiff said he hoped Ukraine wasn’t behind the apparent attack. “We have seen terrible war crimes by Russia against Ukraine and Russia should be held accountable,” he said. “And I certainly would never want to see anything like an attack on civilians by Ukraine and hope that their representations are correct.”
Some analysts pointed to the symbolic significance of an attack against a Putin ally in the heart of Russian territory. “This is the Odintsovo district, this is the very underbelly of Putinism,” Leonid Volkov, a close ally of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, wrote on social media of the location where the blast occurred. “The night explosion scares very, very many real ideologues of war,” he added.
How rare are car bombings in Russia and Ukraine?
Return to menuIn Russia, dozens of journalists, opposition leaders and other critics of the government have been killedin suspicious ways in recent years — including by bombs, poisoning and shooting in incidents that fueled speculation of high-level knowledge or involvement. Russia has also been suspected of extraterritorial killings and attempted killings, including the poisoning of a former Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia with a nerve agent in Britain in 2018. Boris Johnson, then Britain’s foreign secretary, said it was “overwhelmingly likely” that Putin was behind the decision “to direct the use of a nerve agent on the streets of the U.K., on the streets of Europe, for the first time since the Second World War.” The Kremlin denied the accusations.
There have been reports of car bombings in Ukraine against targets aligned with Russia since the start of the war. In June, Kremlin-backed authorities in Kherson, a southern city occupied by Russia, said a senior official was killed by a car bomb. In July, the chief administrator of Velikyi Burluk, a small town east of Kharkiv occupied by Russian forces, was killed by a car bomb that regional authorities blamed on Ukrainian sabotage groups, Russia’s Tass news agency reported.
Well before the war, the U.S. State Department highlighted the case of Pavel Sheremet, a journalist with Russian citizenship who was born in Belarus and worked in Kyiv. Sheremet — who the State Department said in a human rights report on Ukraine “had been critical of Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian authorities” — was killed in 2016 in an explosion in a car that belonged to his partner. He worked for Ukrainian news outlets.
Mary Ilyushina, David L. Stern, Amy B Wang, Liz Sly and Kostiantyn Khudov contributed to this report.
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