Darya Dugin, the daughter of top Putin advisor Aleksandr Dugin was killed outside Moscow after leaving a music festival with her father this evening. She was thirty years old.

Aleksandr Dugin arrived at the scene minutes after the bomb exploded in the Toyota Land Cruiser Prado she was driving on the Mozhayskoye Highway, not far from the village of Bolshiye Vyazyomy. The video below shows the burning SUV in the background which careened off the road and struck a wooden fence.  Dugin can be seen bringing his hands to the top of his head in disbelief.  At his feet and blurred out is another body, not believed to be that of his daughter, who may have also been an occupant of the vehicle or just a bystander near the road when the explosion occurred.

A cursory examination of the video and stills from the attack, suggests a powerful explosive charge destroyed the Range Rover which given Dugin’s high profile as a senior Putin advisor may have been armored.

Early reports state that Darya and Aleksandr had driven together to the Tradition Festival and according to Russian violinist Petr Lundstrem her father was supposed to return in this car but left in another one.

Putin’s Rasputin

Aleksandr Dugin is often called “Putin’s Rasputin” after the Russian mystic who exerted great influence over Tsar Nicholas II in the 1900s until he was murdered in 1916 by other members of the royal family as a threat to the empire of Russia.

Dugin is an ultranationalist Russian who advocates for the restoration of a new Russian empire along three axes of control, Moscow to Berlin, Moscow to Toyko, and Moscow to Tehran. These alliances between Russia, Germany, Japan, and Tehran would be opposed to the globalist world order led by the United States.  Both Putin and Dugin believe that Russia is in fact a Eurasian country and not a part of Europe itself and believe a triumphant Russian culture ruling over most of Europe and Asia.

This idea that Russia is not a white European country but a mixed-race Eurasian country is strongly stated by Dugin here in 2002 where his views seem more in line with the more reactionary Leftist elements here in the US,

“I am a supporter of blacks. White civilization; their cultural values, false, dehumanizing model of the world, built by them – did not pay off. Everything goes to the beginning of the anti-white pogroms on a planetary scale. Russia is saved only by the fact that we are not pure white. Predatory multinational corporations, oppression, and suppression of all others, MTV, gays, and lesbians – this is the fruit of white civilization, from which it is necessary to get rid of. So I am for reds, yellows, greens, blacks – but not for whites. I wholeheartedly on the side of the people of Zimbabwe.”

Dugan had praise for former President Donald Trump, perceiving his Americ First policies as a withdrawal from NATO and Europe and a repudiation of Globalism.  Such a repudiation was in Russia’s interests in expanding its empire as it would push Europe to Russia in the absence of American leadership and a threatened US withdrawal from NATO.

This is not to say that Dugin was a fan of Trump personally. In Trump, Dugin saw an opportunity for exploitation and advocated for Russia to sow internal divisions within the US writing that the Kremlin be involved in, “encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the US. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics ….”

Dugin was a vocal supporter of Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and favored annexing all of Ukraine and folding it into the empire as early in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea, Donbas, and Luhansk saying,

“I can’t believe these are Ukrainians. Ukrainians are wonderful Slavonic people and this is a race of bastards that emerged from the sewer manholes. We should clean up Ukraine from the idiots. The genocide of the cretins is due and inevitable”

Darya Dugin

Darya herself was a political activist following in her father’s ideological footsteps as an outspoken supporter of the invasion of Ukraine and was sanctioned by the US government in March for her connection to an influence campaign called Project Lakhta.

Darya Dugin had been outspoken in her support of Russia’s war against Ukraine, and she was sanctioned by the US government in March in connection with her role in a criminal operation run by the Russian security services (FSB) called “Project Lakhta.”

According to an indictment against a Russian national in 2020, who was charged with “conspiracy to use the stolen identities of real U.S. persons to open fraudulent accounts at banking and cryptocurrency exchanges,” Project Lakhta was, “a Russia-based effort to engage in political and electoral interference operations.  Since at least May 2014, Project Lakhta’s stated goal in the United States has been to disrupt the democratic process and spread distrust towards candidates for political office and the political system in general.”

Who is Responsible?

Representatives of the Russian government were quick to denounce Ukraine for the attack, calling it a terrorist assassination of Dugin’s daughter. As of this writing Ukraine has not accepted responsibility.

On February 28th, The car belonging to the head of police for the Russian backed Donetsk People’s Republic, exploded outside an administration building in the city of Donetsk.

There are certainly signs that Ukraine could be involved. On July 11th,  a Russian-appointed administrator of a small town in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region was killed by a car bomb.

While this bombing displayed a certain level of sophistication, that level does not belong to Ukrainian Special Forces or their Intelligence Service alone.

In 1999, four apartment buildings in Moscow were racked by exploding bombs that killed 300 people and wounded 1,000 more.  Chechen militants were blamed sparking the second Chechen War.

The Russian Mafia is also rather well known for using bombs to kill rivals. In 1994, a wave of bombings in public places in Moscow occurred. The bombs were placed in bans, restaurants, food kiosks, private homes, and cars. These bombings killed a least a dozen Russian bankers in a campaign of intimidation as the mafia sought to consolidate its hold over the Russian banking system.

The economic disruption and isolation in Russia due to sanctions has also impacted the Russian Mafia which owns a significant part of the Russian economy and they may have had enough of this war as it cripples their international trade in currency smuggling, and drugs and human trafficking.

Russia’s own oligarchs are also feeling the pinch as their assets are seized, and they are forbidden to travel outside Russia.  They may not be ready to take action against President Putin himself but struck at Dugin instead, who they may see as having influenced Putin into making a disastrous decision for Russia in invading Ukraine.