Daughter of Russian Author known as ‘Putin’s brain’ killed in car explosion
The daughter
of a prominent Russian nationalist who endorsed a “Russian World” ideology to
justify expansion by the Kremlin, and who’d herself been sanctioned by the US
and UK, was killed in a car bombing.
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According to
Russia's Investigative Committee, 29-year-old Darya Dogina, whose father is
far-right political theorist Alexander Dogin, died died when the Toyota Land Cruiser she
was driving exploded about 20km west of the Moscow on Saturday night.
A personal
acquaintance, Andrey Krasnov, told the state-run news service TASS that the car
belonged to Dugin, who had planned to drive home from an event with his
daughter but "went another way."
Dugin, a
prominent writer on geopolitics and a critic of the United States and Europe,
is an outspoken proponent of the policy of Eurasianism, who sees Russia as an
empire with orthodox beliefs and values as opposed to the liberal West.
He believes
that Russia has a mission to unify the historically Russian-speaking world
under Kremlin rule, and has been an outspoken supporter of Russian control over
Ukraine.
Dugin has
limited influence in the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin wrote a lengthy
essay in 2021 on the "historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians" in
which he dismissed modern Ukraine as "entirely a product of the Soviet
era".
Russian
investigators are working to determine who may have ordered the killings on
Saturday.
Russian
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that if evidence emerges that
Ukraine was behind the plot to kill Dogina, then we should talk about the policy
of state terrorism implemented by the Kyiv government.
“Of course,
Ukraine has nothing to do with” Dugina’s death, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser
to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, said on Ukrainian
television. “We are not a criminal state like Russian Federation, and certainly
not a terrorist state.”
Dugin, 60,
was sanctioned by the United States in 2015 over his alleged involvement in
Moscow's annexation of Crimea.
Following
Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, the United States and UK imposed sanctions
on Dugina. Britain described him as a "high-level and frequent contributor
of disinformation about the war". The US Treasury cited his role as
editor-in-chief of the website United World International.
Krasnov told
TASS that when Dogina "turned onto the Mozhaiskoye highway near the
village of Bolshiye Vyazemi, there was an explosion, the car immediately caught
fire."
"The
flames completely engulfed it. She lost control because she was driving at high
speed and flew off the opposite side of the road," Krasnov added, as
quoted by TASS.
Meanwhile,
forensic experts, investigators and explosive engineering experts are
inspecting the scene.
Dogina, the
daughter, was born in 1992 and studied philosophy at Moscow State University,
according to TASS.
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