A Putin ally’s daughter was killed near Russia’s
capital: What to know
By
Annabelle Timsit and Rachel Pannett
Updated
August 21, 2022 at 12:11 p.m. EDT|Published August 21, 2022 at 10:16 a.m. EDT
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 what Russian investigative authorities
said looked like a “murder for hire.”
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The
incident already appears poised to become a flash point, as pro-Russian
factions blame Ukraine without evidence — and Ukrainian officials deny 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 the blast occurred, engulfing the car in flames. Some outside analysts and
friends of the family suspect that Dugin was the real target. Dugina, 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.
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?
Dugin, 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.
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?
Dugina, a
Russian political commentator and 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.
Was the car
explosion an orchestrated attack?
Russia’s
Investigative Committee 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.
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.” “Darya was
driving another car but she took his car today,” he said.
What does
this mean for Russia’s war with Ukraine?
The
incident appeared poised to create 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.”
A Russian
soldier’s journal: ‘I will not participate in this madness’
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?
In Russia,
dozens of journalists, opposition leaders and other critics of the government
have been killed in 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.
By Annabelle Timsit
Annabelle
Timsit is a breaking news reporter for The Washington Post's London hub,
covering news as it unfolds in the United States and around the world during
the early morning hours in Washington.
Twitter
By Rachel
Pannett
Rachel
Pannett joined the Post's foreign desk in 2021 after more than a decade with
The Wall Street Journal, where she was deputy bureau chief for Australia and
New Zealand. Twitter
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