Russian security service claim to have identified
killer of Darya Dugina lacks credibility
Analysis: rapid detection of supposed culprit by the
FSB raises question of why no arrest was made
Shaun
Walker
Mon 22 Aug
2022 17.04 BST
Each new
claim over the attack that killed Darya Dugina seems to raise more questions
than it answers.
On Monday,
Russia’s FSB security service claimed to have cracked the case, publishing
information and a video it said showed a Ukrainian woman from the country’s
Azov regiment was responsible for the murder of Dugina, whose father is the
far-right ideologue Alexander Dugin.
According
to the FSB, the assassin managed to enter Russia with her 12-year-old daughter
in tow, move around undetected while frequently changing the plates on her Mini
Cooper, plant and detonate a professional explosive device, and leave the
country.
Supposedly,
she managed to do all this without being spotted by Russia’s security services
until after she had fled, presumably by posing as one of the hundreds of
thousands of Ukrainians who have either sought refuge in Russia or been
forcibly deported from occupied areas of Ukraine.
The FSB’s
claims will be met with extreme scepticism, and Ukraine has strongly denied any
involvement in the attack, pointing out that Dugin was a marginal figure and
insisting it does not carry out this kind of mission.
But it is
not impossible to imagine a motive for Kyiv: Dugina’s death came as Ukrainians
are increasingly taking the fight to Russia in occupied Crimea for the first
time since the invasion in February. Operations such as an audacious plan to
lure a group of Russian mercenaries to Ukraine two years ago show that there
are those in the Ukrainian services who like to think big.
Additionally,
while it is true that Dugin is hardly the Putin-whisperer that some make him
out to be, there is no doubt that he does have high name recognition both in
Russia and the west, and he has made frequent, odious calls for violence
against Ukraine and Ukrainians. If the calculation was for a high-profile
target who was nonetheless reasonably vulnerable and had minimal security,
Dugin would not be an illogical choice, assuming that he and not his daughter
was the original intended target.
However,
the speed with which the FSB has come up with video “evidence”, as well as
several rather puzzling aspects of its story, certainly raise red flags. For an
agency that has failed to solve numerous high-profile murders in Russia,
including of Putin critics, the speed of the FSB’s work on this case is as
suspicious as its lack of progress elsewhere.
Other
versions of events floated also seem far from watertight. On Sunday, the former
Russian MP Ilya Ponomarev, now living in exile in Kyiv, claimed that partisans
from a hitherto-unknown group called the National Republican Army were behind
the attack, adding an unexpected and intriguing dimension to the case. But
Ponomarev did not provide any evidence, and many observers have dismissed the
claim as a publicity stunt.
Officials
in Ukraine have suggested the killing was more likely to be a “false flag”
operation, organised by the Russian state in order to frame Ukraine and provide
a justification for further violence. Certainly, it has done that:
propagandists such as Margarita Simonyan of the television network RT have
called for increased targeting of Ukraine and Ukrainians in the aftermath.
However, it
is not clear that Russia needed any pretext to continue its aggression, and if
the whole case was a set-up, it is one that makes the FSB and Russian state
look curiously vulnerable and incompetent.
In the
FSB’s version of events, a Ukrainian assassin was able to enter Russia, carry
out a high-profile killing near the capital and then flee, all without being
apprehended. The FSB footage shows the supposed assassin looking icily calm,
with her young daughter in tow, as she enters and leaves Russia and moves
around the capital.
If true, it
is a shocking FSB failure and, if false, it is a strangely self-incriminating
tale to invent.
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