Russia’s claim: A Ukrainian woman carried out the bombing, which killed Daria Dugina, then went to Estonia.

Russia’s claim: A Ukrainian woman carried out the bombing, which killed Daria Dugina, then went to Estonia.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/08/22/world/ukraine-russia-war-news

 

The Russian authorities on Monday blamed Ukraine for organizing the killing of Daria Dugina, the ultranationalist daughter of a prominent Russian supporter of the invasion, a claim that raised fears of a further escalation in the six-month war.

 

Ukraine has denied having anything to do with the car bombing on Saturday that killed Ms. Dugina, 29, on a highway in an affluent district outside of Moscow.

 

Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, the F.S.B., issued a statement on Monday saying that the attack “was prepared and committed by the Ukrainian intelligence agencies.” The claim could not be independently verified.

 

Some Russian media reports had said that Ms. Dugina’s father, Aleksandr Dugin, an ultranationalist writer who helped build the ideological foundation for President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, was the likely target of the blast.

 

But the F.S.B.’s statement described Ms. Dugina — herself a hawkish commentator who had earned a following with frequent appearances on state media — as the intended target.

 

Soon after the F.S.B.’s announcement, the Kremlin published a letter of sympathy from Mr. Putin to Ms. Dugina’s parents, the Russian leader’s first statement about the attack. “A vile, cruel crime ended the life of Daria Dugina — a bright, talented person with a real Russian heart,” Mr. Putin wrote, making no mention of the perpetrators or of Ukraine. “She proved in her actions what it means to be a patriot of Russia.”

 

In its statement, the F.S.B. alleged that a Ukrainian woman had been contracted to carry out the bombing, saying that she had entered Russia on July 23 and rented an apartment in the Moscow building where Ms. Dugina lived “in order to organize the murder of Dugina and obtain information about her lifestyle.” The woman was at the same nationalist festival attended by Ms. Dugina and her father on Saturday before the bombing, the agency said.

 

Ukraine’s presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, tweeted that the F.S.B. statement was “propaganda” from a “fictional world.”

 

The F.S.B. also alleged that the perpetrator of the bombing had left Russia for Estonia, later releasing video footage of what it said showed her in a gray Mini Cooper crossing the border. The Estonian Foreign Ministry said it had no immediate comment. But the F.S.B.’s claim was likely to further inflame tensions with the Baltic nation, which has been among Europe’s leading critics of the Kremlin.

 

A senior Russian lawmaker, Vladimir Dzhabarov, said on Monday that if Estonia did not hand over the woman, there would be “every reason for the Russian Federation to take tough actions against the Estonian state.”

 

The car bombing came on the heels of a spate of Ukrainian attacks deep behind the front line in Crimea, and the F.S.B.’s accusations heightened the clamor among the war’s most ardent cheerleaders to escalate the fighting and punish President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

 

“The Zelensky regime must be destroyed,” Sergei Mironov, a hawkish leader in the Russian parliament, said in a state television interview. “What the Ukrainian intelligence agencies are doing today on the orders of Zelensky is terrorism in its truest form.”

 

But the F.S.B. statement may be unlikely to convince critics of Mr. Putin that Ukraine was indeed behind the crime. Coming just over 36 hours after the blast, the agency’s declaration that it had “solved” the crime represented an extraordinarily rapid investigation compared to other high-profile assassinations — like those of the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in 2015 or of the independent journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, cases that remain unsolved.

 

And the agency has been accused of staging attacks for political ends. Two decades ago, the F.S.B. was accused of involvement in bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow that killed more than 300 people and touched off Russia’s invasion of the republic of Chechnya. Those accusations were never confirmed. At the time, residents in Ryazan, 115 miles from Moscow, said they had found intelligence agents planting explosives underneath an apartment building, prompting the F.S.B. to apologize and assert that the material in question was sugar sacks and that the incident was a security exercise.

 

Andrew Higgins contributed reporting.

 

— Anton Troianovski