Russian investigators said Daria Dugina, a nationalist journalist and political analyst, died when the Toyota Land Cruiser she was driving exploded outside Odintsovo, a suburb about 20 kilometers west of Moscow. The bomb was planted under the car on the driver’s side and killed Dugina on the spot, investigators added, saying “the crime was pre-planned in [someone’s] orders”. The attack came after Ukraine appeared to be carrying out a series of increasingly daring attacks on Russian-held territory and hundreds of miles behind the front line in mainland Russia itself in recent weeks. Investigators are examining the scene of the bombing on Sunday. The bomb was planted under the car on the driver’s side © Investigative Committee of Russia/AP The car belonged to her father Alexander Dugin, whom she had accompanied while he gave a lecture at a festival outside the capital earlier on Saturday. The far-right philosopher had planned to travel with her after the lecture, but decided to change cars, Andrei Krasnov, a friend of Dugina, told the state-run Tass news network. Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, denied that Kyiv was involved in the attack. “Ukraine has absolutely nothing to do with this, because we are not a criminal state like Russia, nor a terrorist state,” Podoliak told Ukrainian television. Dugin’s friends and prominent supporters of the war called on Russia to strike back against Kiev. “He took his car today, while Alexander went a different way. He returned, he was at the scene of the tragedy. “As far as I understand, Alexander or possibly they together were the target,” Krasnov said. 112, a news channel on the Telegram social networking app, posted a video of Dugin standing on a street littered with burning debris, holding his head in his hands after apparently witnessing the explosion. Dugina, 29, is the first high-profile supporter of Putin’s invasion to be killed on the outskirts of Moscow, where life has continued largely as normal despite Western sanctions aimed at undermining the Kremlin’s war effort. “The botched assassination of Daria is a sign of the enemy’s cowardice and weakness. Suffering of his death. He cannot fight honestly, so he kills the best of us,” said Konstantin Malofeyev, a tycoon who funds a nationalist news channel where both Dugins used to work. “The enemy will answer for this very soon.” The elder Dugin founded the Eurasia movement, which advocates a revanchist Russian imperialism to help Moscow assert greater control over its European and Asian hinterlands. A former Soviet-era dissident philosopher, Dugin’s writings found a following among some hard-line senior members of the security services and subsequently appeared to inspire Putin’s decision to annex Crimea and launch a slow-moving war in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region in 2014. Although Dugin’s influence with Putin has sometimes been overstated – he lost his professorship at Moscow’s main university and his appearances on state television were curtailed – the US and Canada sanctioned him in 2015 after his movement in Eurasia recruited volunteers to fight in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. Dugina, who worked with her father in the Eurasian movement, was sanctioned herself in March by the US and the UK for her work running a Russian propaganda website. The UK described her as a “frequent and high-profile contributor to disinformation” about the invasion.
