A Brazen Political Assassination Rattles the Kremlin
A car bomb killed the daughter of Russia’s leading ideologue
The ultranationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin is Russia’s leading far-right evangelist preaching the gospel of military expansionism, and a key intellectual architect of Vladimir Putin’s brutal misadventure in Ukraine. He’s a self-styled philosopher of what he calls “Eurasianism,” and an influential television personality who’s been referred to as “Putin’s brain” and “Putin’s Rasputin,” immediately recognizable with his signature flowing grey beard spewing the Kremlin’s propaganda on Russian state television.
Late last night, Alexander Dugin’s pitiless ideology exploded in a fiery burst of shrapnel. In yet another sign of the Kremlin’s dwindling fortunes in Ukraine, the war Dugin so expertly peddled reached out to him, and finally settled on his daughter.
Like a Russian version of Steve Bannon, Alexander Dugin is a bombastic and media-savvy ideologue, a neofascist agitator who is said to have the ear of Vladimir Putin himself. He’s friendly with an unsavory assortment of far-right nationalist politicians across Europe and beyond, inhabiting the same radical populist circles as his American counterpart.
Dugin has played a central role advocating for the “reabsorption” of Ukraine, and literally wrote the book of false justifications and historical distortions underlying the invasion, the grandiosely-titled “Foundations of Geopolitics.” The 600-plus-page thumper is akin to mandatory reading for Russia’s military and foreign policy elites. In it, Dugin articulates his vision of Russia as a felled superpower that must restore its imperial destiny, and serve as a conservative bulwark against the decaying American-led liberal order.
Indeed, over the years, Dugin has forcefully argued that Ukraine doesn’t actually exist, outside of being a rebellious border region of Russia. This delusion was adopted by Putin as the primary basis for his “special military operation,” making Dugin perhaps the most hated man in Kyiv, save for Putin himself.
Thus, it’s not hard to imagine that there are more than a few people who would love to see Alexander Dugin, the ‘spiritual guide’ for the war, dead.
Wet work
Late last night, his daughter and political fellow traveler, Daria Dugina, paid the ultimate price for her and her father’s destructive vision. In a moment that was reminiscent of the violent upheaval during the 1990s in post-Soviet Russia, Dugina was engulfed in flames after a powerful car bomb detonated while she was driving her father’s Land Cruiser at high speed in a ritzy suburb of Moscow, Rublyovka. The blast was so massive that windows shattered in nearby buildings.
It immediately set off a seething political firestorm in Russia, and exposed the vulnerability of the Kremlin’s ruling elite, shaking waning confidence further amid Russia’s demoralizing military performance in Ukraine.
Dugina did not survive the blast, unsurprisingly.
No one has taken responsibility for the strike, even as Ukraine and Russia trade accusations with one another. Among the theories circulating, one has it that Putin himself ordered the hit to distract from his recent military setbacks in Crimea, and to silence pro-war critics demanding steeper escalation in the war, a false flag.
There’s been rampant speculation that the real target was Alexander Dugin himself, and that his daughter was, at best, a secondary target for whomever ordered the hit. Still, Dugina, 29, shared her father’s violent politics in her brief career as a journalist, coming under both British and American sanctions for disseminating disinformation on behalf of the Kremlin, and supporting the invasion.
It was the kind of political assassination usually reserved for Vladimir Putin’s enemies, rather than his allies, and it sparked a frenzied round of rumor and a palpable unease amid the upper echelons of the Kremlin.
Certainly, the hit was designed to send an unmistakable message, striking at a key figure in the heart of the Russian capital. It was hardly subtle.
In that regard, the assassination was a resounding success, coming at a time when Moscow is struggling to consolidate its paltry territorial gains on the battlefield, and at a moment when Ukraine is already pursuing an effective campaign of strikes and sabotage far behind the frontlines in Russian-held Crimea and within Russia itself.
Still, this was a clear tactical escalation.
For his part, President Volodomyr Zelensky denied that Ukraine had anything whatsoever to do with the assassination of Daria Dugina. Even if he ordered it, however, it’s unlikely he would accept responsibility for such an operation.
At a minimum, the brazen hit underscores the Kremlin’s mounting difficulties, six months into the largest and bloodiest land war since WWII, and shows a conflict that is increasingly reaching deep into Russia itself. It’s a sobering thought for the men and women supporting Putin. It certainly does nothing to alleviate the mounting anxiety and dread when one of their own is targeted and eliminated by professional killers.
I’m not sure what would be more terrifying, the fact that well-trained assassins are covertly operating in the streets of Moscow, picking Kremlin insiders off, or that it might be the Kremlin itself who ordered the hit. In the vicious hall of mirrors that is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, perhaps it doesn’t make a difference.
By now, retribution is expected by those who have aided Putin in his diabolical project. So much evil and cruelty cannot go unanswered.
From whence it comes hardly matters.
What matters is that retribution is coming. This hit was a reminder of that simple and inescapable fact. For those still supporting Vladimir Putin, and who are enabling his genocidal war, they would do well to remember that karma is a bitch.
