The Kremlin is opening a murder investigation. The explosion indicates that partisans have a relatively far-reaching influence in Russia, which could therefore also affect the circles of the Russian president. Dugin is not officially affiliated with the Kremlin, but is known as a great source of inspiration for Vladimir Putin and ‘the mastermind’ behind the war in Ukraine.
An acquaintance of the family suspects that the perpetrators wanted to hit Dugin. No one has claimed responsibility for the explosion, but some pro-Kremlin opinion makers directly railed at the Ukrainian government. The editor-in-chief of the state medium Russia Today Margarita Simonjan called for ‘actions against decision-makers’ in Kyiv.
Back from festival
29-year-old Darya Dugina, like her father a media personality and supporter of the war in Ukraine, was on his way home from a festival on the outskirts of Moscow. The Commission of Inquiry confirms that she was in the exploded car.
An acquaintance of the Dugin family tells the Russian state medium bag that the exploded Toyota Land Cruiser Prado belonged to her father. Dugin himself was also at the festival, but was said to have driven home in a different car at the last minute. Images circulated on social media of a bearded man, presumably Dugin, watching the crime scene in disbelief.
Dugin is the founder of the ultra-nationalist ‘Eurasian movement’ and has inspired the geopolitics of the Kremlin with his books. He is said to have been the driving force behind the 2014 annexation of Crimea, which he publicly advocated six years earlier. He has been on the sanctions list of the United States and the European Union since 2015.
In Dugin’s conservative thinking, it is important that Russia forms a large, powerful empire, in which all Russian-speaking people are united. That is the only way to counterbalance liberalism in the West internationally. Ukraine plays an important role in his thinking. A Slavic country moving to the West, as Kyiv has been trying to do for the past eight years, is ideologically inconceivable. The Kremlin is diligently borrowing from its material to justify its invasion of Ukraine.
Darya Dugina followed her father’s line. She was a prominent journalist in Russia, often using her podium in recent months to support the invasion of Ukraine. She saw the war as a ‘clash between Eurasian and globalist populations’. In an interview with a well-known Youtuber she called the West ‘a liberal Nazi society, which has a problem with cancelculture’.