Alexander Dugin’s Daughter Darya killed By Car Bomb In Russia
The daughter of well-known, ultra-nationalist scholar Alexander Dugin was killed by a vehicle bomb on the outskirts of Moscow, according to Russian authorities, who said Sunday that they had launched a murder probe.
The Russian Investigative Committee said it believed someone planned and ordered the car explosion that killed Darya Dugina, based on evidence already collected from the blast. “Taking into account the data already obtained, the investigation believes that the crime was pre-planned and was of an ordered nature,” the investigative committee said in a statement Sunday.
Dugina died at the scene after “an explosive device, presumably installed in the Toyota Land Cruiser, went off on a public road and the car caught fire” at around 9.00 p.m. local time on Saturday, near the village of Bolshiye Vyazemy, according to the press service of the Russian Investigative Committee, as reported by the Russian state news agency TASS.
Author and ideologist Dugina’s father is credited with having planned or served as the “spiritual leader” of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He was dubbed “Putin’s Brain” by Foreign Affairs magazine and is rumored to be a major influence on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Both Dugin and his daughter have been sanctioned by the United States. The United Kingdom sanctioned Dugina in July for being “a frequent and high-profile contributor of disinformation in relation to Ukraine and the Russian invasion of Ukraine on various online platforms,” it wrote.
Videos of the explosion showed a burning car at the side of the road and shattered auto pieces all over the vicinity. Dugin may be seen in an unconfirmed video taken at the scene.
A friend of Dugina told TASS that he believed Dugina’s father was the true target of the blast — or possibly both of them — as the car belonged to Alexander.
“It’s her father’s car,” Krasnov told TASS. “Dasha (Darya) drives another car, but she drove his car today, and Alexander went separately,” Andrei Krasnov, head of the Russky Gorizont (Russian Horizon) social movement and a personal acquaintance of Dugina’s family, told TASS.
An official from the Russian foreign ministry said that the explosion was caused by Ukrainian state structures, an allegation that the Ukrainian government has refuted.
“If the Ukrainian trace is confirmed… then we should talk about the policy of state terrorism implemented by the Kyiv regime,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a Telegram post. “There have been plenty of facts accumulated over the years: from political calls for violence to the leadership and participation of Ukrainian state structures in crimes,” she said.
Ukraine on Sunday strenuously denied any involvement in the car explosion. “Ukraine definitely has nothing to do with this because we are not a criminal state, which the Russian Federation is, and even more so, we are not a terrorist state,” Mykhailo Podoliak, adviser to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, said in a Ukrainian TV interview.
The daughter, Dugina, studied philosophy at Moscow State University and was born in 1992, per TASS.
