Web Desk (LTN NEWS): The daughter of influential ultranationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin was killed by a car bomb on the outskirts of Moscow on Sunday. Russian authorities said on Sunday that they had opened a murder investigation.
The Russian Investigative Committee said that the car explosion that killed Darya Dugina was probably planned and ordered by someone. This was based on evidence already found at the scene of the explosion. “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 when “an explosive device, likely installed in the Toyota Land Cruiser, went off on a public road and the car caught fire,” according to the press service of the Russian Investigative Committee, as reported by the Russian state news agency TASS. This happened around 9 p.m. local time on Saturday near the village of Bolshiye Vyazemy.
Dugina’s father is a Russian author and political thinker who is often called the “spiritual guide” or “architect” of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He is said to have a lot of power over Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Foreign Affairs magazine called him “Putin’s Brain.”
Both Dugin and his daughter have been sanctioned by the United States. In July, the UK imposed sanctions on Dugina because, according to a statement, she was “a frequent and high-profile contributor of false information about Ukraine and the Russian invasion of Ukraine on different online platforms.”
Videos of the explosion showed a car on fire on the side of the road and broken pieces of cars all over the area. One video that can’t be checked seems to show Dugin at the scene.
“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.
Sunday, Ukraine strongly denied that it had anything to do with the car explosion. In an interview on Ukrainian TV, Mykhailo Podoliak, an adviser to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, said, “Ukraine has nothing to do with this. We are not a criminal state like the Russian Federation, and even more so, we are not a terrorist state.”
