Lethal Spy Games Shake Moscow
Vladimir Putin’s wilderness of mirrors swallows the truth
As far as these things go, the FSB’s assertion that Ukraine was responsible for the brazen assassination of Daria Dugina late Saturday night by car bomb should not have been all that controversial by itself. The victim was the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin, a key ideological author of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, and easily one of Ukraine’s most reviled enemies in a country that is teeming with bitter adversaries.
Thus, it should have surprised exactly no one that Aleksandr Dugin was targeted for assassination by the government in Kyiv, in what seemed to be a well-earned act of revenge and retaliation for his role as the preeminent ideological architect of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The fact that it was Dugin’s daughter who was ultimately killed didn’t seem to change this calculus; like her father, she was a rabid champion of the war in Ukraine, and a familiar figure in Russia’s far-right political circles. She parroted the Kremlin’s propaganda on Russian state TV, and was sanctioned by the United States and Britain, together with her father.
It all seemed to add up rather nicely, lethal vengeance for the complicit offspring of the “spiritual guide” who led Ukraine to hell. But was it?
Daria Dugina was driving her father’s Land Cruiser at high speed, with her father following close behind her in a separate vehicle when the car suddenly exploded, likely by remote control. Dugin witnessed his daughter’s fiery death, and afterward, he was captured by photographers looking stunned standing by the side of the road, seemingly in shock.
This was a professional murder by car bomb in an affluent suburb of Moscow, targeting a member of the Kremlin aristocracy.
It might have been just the latest and most brazen attack yet in a series of strikes authored by partisans and Ukraine’s intelligence services recently, designed to sow fear and disrupt operations far behind the frontlines everywhere from Crimea to Belgorod just across the border from Ukraine.
And yet there remains more than a bit of doubt floating around in the ether about this hit, an irritating sense that it isn’t quite what it appears to be.
Indeed, it smells funny.
In this tangled clandestine universe, it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not. Led by a former intelligence officer who’s primary trait is his Machiavellian cunning, Russia is “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” as Winston Churchill famously observed in 1939. If anything, Russia’s only grown stranger, even more inscrutable since then.
Nothing about Vladimir Putin’s autocracy begets clarity.
Rather, it breeds suspicion, because the Kremlin lies to the Russian people and to the world at large as a matter of course.
By design, Russia is saturated with both real conspiracies and fabricated conspiracy theories, rife disinformation, influence operations, and a variety of active measures designed to shape politics and society.
However, instinct matters, and a bad feeling is sometimes the only gauge of things when you can’t possibly trust official sources, and the official story.
Something about the assassination just didn’t sit quite right.
At a minimum, unanswered questions remain. The FSB had a nearly-instantaneous explanation ready about a Ukrainian hit team; they painted a picture of a mother using her 12 year old daughter as cover. The FSB released footage of an attractive blonde woman entering Russia driving a Mini Cooper, walking around the apartment complex where Daria Dugina purportedly lived, and more footage of her leaving Russia for Estonia. Then her trail goes cold.
Apparently, the woman’s name is Nathalie Volk. The FSB says she’s a Ukrainian assassin, something the Ukrainians have strenuously denied.
The FSB’s video dossier was greeted with skepticism; the FSB isn’t usually in the business of solving crimes, because it’s usually committing them. It’s suspected of orchestrating a string of Moscow terrorist bombings that sealed Putin’s rise to power, and led to war in Chechnya, as the New York Times observed today.
The speed of the solution was also notable. In fact, the speed of the FSB’s detective work led some to believe the dossier of “Nathalie Volk” was a fabrication, a convenient distraction prepared in advance to obscure the real killers and the real motives.
Perhaps this niggling doubt was unavoidable. After all, the FSB isn’t exactly a paragon of truth-telling candor. Rather, it’s the murderous successor to the Soviet KGB, an organization known as perhaps the most sophisticated and talented purveyor of conspiracy theories, half-truths, and outright lies in the entire world. It’s an intelligence agency that spent the Soviet Union’s existence brutally enforcing a totalitarian regime constructed with lies, by surveilling, imprisoning, and killing its own citizens.
This KGB gave birth to Vladimir Putin, and now, instead of servicing the Kremlin’s dreams of communism, it does Putin’s personal and political bidding, interceding on his behalf to protect him and his allies. Certainly, the FSB is not averse to involving itself in internecine rivalries, killing Putin’s enemies, or solving his political problems; the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, and Boris Nemtsov, and the attempted murder and imprisonment of Alexei Navalny show the FSB at work.
For Russians who have displeased Putin, the FSB’s a terrifying thing to behold.
Kremlin politics are naturally opaque, and further obscured by lies and propaganda. Still, one reason for Dugina’s murder would be to alleviate the mounting pressure Putin is feeling from his right flank, from pro-war Russians who are irritated at the military losses, intelligence foibles, and dissatisfied with the generally poor state of the war.
In any case, the murder has effectively transformed the larger political conversation in Moscow, after a run of Russian setbacks, amid successes by Ukraine operating behind the lines. Dugina’s assassination fits neatly into that narrative, galvanizing Russian anger at Ukraine’s brazen hit.
Indeed, Putin publicly lionized Dugina, calling her murder a “vile, cruel crime.” Curiously, his letter didn’t mention Ukraine at all.
Right now, there’s simply no way to know who killed Dugina, or why. The only thing we know for certain is that it was a professional assassination by operatives working inside the Russian capital, something the Ukrainians have not done until now.
Was the 29 year old daughter of an ideologue the worthiest target? Perhaps.
As Putin struggles to pull some kind of empty political victory from the gaping strategic pit he’s dug in Ukraine, there’s every reason to believe he will operate proactively inside Russia to protect himself from the looming danger of military failure.
Russian society punishes leaders who lose wars, and Putin knows this all too well.
If Putin can’t seem to win the war he started in Ukraine, he certainly can’t afford to lose it, either. At the very least, he can still manipulate domestic opinion in a variety of cruel and creative ways. As we measure Russia’s official response in the coming days, and watch whether or not Putin meaningfully escalates the war (if Russia’s not already too spent militarily), we might learn more about who killed the ideologue’s daughter, and why.
Or we may learn nothing at all. Like shrapnel from an exploding car bomb, reality in Russia can feel like it’s going a million different directions at once, before it comes back to earth to form a pile of rubble at the feet of the czar.
