Darya Dugina, daughter of the Russian nationalist philospher Alexander Dugin, sometimes described as “Putin’s brain”, has died after a car her father was due to travel in exploded.
Dugin, 60, is what might be called a radical traditionalist as well as a “Eurasianist” or neo-Eurasianist — that is, he seeks the establishment of a bloc comprising the former Soviet Union, allied to the likes of Iran and Turkey, able to break the global hegemony of the U.S.-led West and lay down a new, multipolar status quo.
Dugin strongly supported the annexation of the Crimea following the Western-backed Euromaidan coup in Ukraine in 2014, and pushed hard for early, strong intervention in the Donbas after war broke out between Kyiv (Kiev) and pro-Russia separatists there, blaming an internal struggle in the Kremlin between “patriotic, Orthodox, conservative forces and the liberal forces” backed by “most of the political elite [and] the oligarchs” for Vladimir Putin’s failure to act as he wished him to.
Naturally, Dugin backed the special military operation in Ukraine, as the Kremlin terms it, when it was launched earlier this year, as did his journalist daughter, 29-year-old Darya Dugina.
She has now died after a car her father was supposed to be travelling in exploded as they were returning from the Tradition festival a the Zakharovo estate near Moscow. He had decided to travel in another car only at the last minute, according to the BBC.
The Russian authorities said that “[a]n explosive device was placed on the underside of the car on the driver’s side” and confirmed that “Darya Dugina, who was behind the wheel, died at the scene,” according to a statement quoted by the Reuters news agency.
“The investigation believes that the crime was planned in advance and was of a contractual nature,” they added.
Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry’s main spokeswoman, implied Ukraine was suspected of involvement in the blast, saying that an investigation was still underway but that if “the Ukrainian trace is confirmed… then we are talking about the policy of state terrorism implemented by the Kiev regime,” according to Tass.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, meanwhile, has insisted that “Ukraine, of course, had nothing to do with this because we are not a criminal state, like the Russian Federation, and moreover we are not a terrorist state” — although he did describe Dugina’s death as an example of “Karmic” retribution for supporters of the invasion.
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