In the evening of August 20, 2022, political scientist and journalist Darya Dugin, daughter of well-known Russian philosopher and socio-political figure Alexander Dugin, was tragically killed near Moscow
According to representatives of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, the crime was pre-planned and made to order. Experts say that neither Alexander Dugin nor his daughter owned any business, so the murder was likely political. If this theory is confirmed, Daria’s death could be considered a turning point in the political life of modern Russia.
On 20 August at about 9:30 p.m., a Land Cruiser Prado vehicle exploded on the Mozhaiskoye Highway near the village of Bolshiye Vyazemi. The car was being driven by 29-year-old political scientist and journalist Daria Dugina, daughter of famous Russian philosopher Alexander Dugina. She was returning from a patriotic festival called Tradition. As acquaintances would later write, her father was supposed to be travelling in the same car with her, but he moved in with friends at the last minute. Daria died on the spot as a result of the car bombing.
The Investigative Committee opened a criminal case under part 2 of article 105 of the Russian Criminal Code (murder committed by public means). The case will be investigated by the central apparatus of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation. According to representatives of the agency, the crime had been premeditated and ordered. It is not yet clear who the main target of the criminals was – the father, the daughter, or both at the same time.
Alexander Dugin is a well-known Russian philosopher. He is the leader of the International Eurasian Movement and the author of “the fourth political theory”, which, in his opinion, should be the next step in the development of politics after the first three: liberalism, socialism and fascism.
The French magazine Actuel called Dugin “the most influential thinker of the post-communist era”, and the American publication Foreign Policy included him in the top 100 “global thinkers” of the modern world in 2014. He was an adviser to the chairman of the Russian State Duma, acting head of the Department of Sociology of International Relations at Moscow State University and editor-in-chief of Tsargrad TV channel.
Back in 2005, he publicly warned the public about the dangers emanating from the Maidan protests in Ukraine and actually predicted what they have led to today.
In 2014, Dugin was a supporter of the “hard line” against the perpetrators of the coup d’état in Kiev. His personal details were posted by Ukrainian neo-Nazis on the extremist website Peacemaker, and the US and other Western countries imposed personal sanctions on him.
Daria followed in her father’s footsteps – becoming a philosopher, political scientist and journalist. The MSU website lists the girl as a postgraduate student in the Department of Foreign Philosophy, author of research articles, reports and a course. She has also worked as a journalist – in particular, she hosted a programme on radio Komsomolskaya Pravda. According to media reports, she has visited the Donbass republics on several occasions, providing assistance to local civilians. Recently, the UK authorities imposed sanctions against her.
Unofficially, the vast majority of experts immediately saw the Ukrainian or Western special services as a trace in the incident.
“Ukrainian (and any other) terrorism must be stopped by any means… The investigation and expertise will tell everything, but logic suggests that the attack is of Ukrainian nature,” the MIG telegram channel wrote.
“Nasty scoundrels! Terrorists of the Ukrainian regime, trying to eliminate Alexander Dugin, blew up his daughter… In a car. Light memory to Daria, she is a real Russian girl!”, said Denis Pushilin, head of the DNR.
Ilya Ponomarev, a fugitive former State Duma deputy who is wanted in Russia for embezzlement and was granted citizenship in Ukraine, announced with a happy smile on Kiev TV that a certain Russian “National Republican Army” (NRA), which he personally assisted, was allegedly behind the murder of Daria Dugina.
Representatives of the Office of the President of Ukraine said that the Kiev regime had no direct involvement in the murder. However, these statements must be viewed critically.
The fact is that the day before Daria’s murder, the Ukrainian television channel 1+1, from which Vladimir Zelensky, incidentally, comes from, broadcast a story in which Alexander Dugin was declared the “brain of Putin” and “ideologist of Russian civilization”. Incidentally, the Ukrainian journalists brought in the same Ilya Ponomarev as an expert in the programme. In other words, the Ukrainian audience in the media close to Zelensky was “prepared in advance” for the crime that then took place in the suburbs of Moscow. To speak after this about the “non-involvement” of the Ukrainian special services in the incident is simply not serious.
At the same time, the planning and implementation of the criminal plot on the territory of the Russian Federation would hardly have been possible without local accomplices. Therefore, if the notorious “NRA” does exist, it is clearly under the control of Kiev, just as the representatives of the group liquidated the other day by the FSB in Volgograd oblast while attempting to carry out a terrorist act.
On 22 August, the FSB’s Public Relations Centre reported that it had identified the perpetrator of the crime. She was a citizen of Ukraine, Natalya Vovk, born in 1979, who had entered the territory of Russia about a month earlier together with her underage daughter Sophia Shaban, and who left Russia through the border with Estonia. Moreover, as well-known blogger Anatoly Shariy found out, the car in which Vovk was following the Dugins has already been put up for sale in Kiev.
Against this background, it cannot be ruled out that the Daria Dugina murder case could be reclassified as an act of terrorism in the future.
After all, if the Ukrainian trail is confirmed, it would appear that the crime was committed in order to exert pressure on society with the aim of “destabilizing the activities of the authorities <…> or influencing their decision-making” – as stated in the relevant article of the Russian Criminal Code.
In that case, justice will await those “non-systemic oppositionists” who, immediately following Daria’s murder, began publicly mocking the girl’s death. After all, their actions could be automatically qualified under Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code.
“All those who are now mocking Dasha’s death, practicing sarcasm and trolling, all these mundeppes, bloggers and activists, should be arrested. Time to take out the trash,” RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan wrote in her telegram channel.
“Should be arrested. But they won’t be. And I understand that very well. And you understand it too. In Russia you can collect money to support the AFU with impunity. This is a fact. And to mock the death of a Russian patriot is not considered a crime at all,” journalist Andrey Medvedev wrote in response, and I want to believe that he was wrong.
After all, the murder of Daria Dugina is a turning point in modern history. The perpetrators struck not on the border but in the very heart of Russia.
And their target was not a military figure or even a manager – but a purely civilian person, a fragile intellectual girl, whose only fault in the eyes of those who ordered the crime was that she dared to think independently. And this takes the confrontation to a whole new level. The next target of the criminals could be absolutely any civilian.
The Kiev regime thus finally equates itself with terrorist groups like IS (a terrorist organisation banned in the Russian Federation – note: RuBaltic.Ru), and all those sympathetic to it in Russia are supporters of terrorism, with all the ensuing consequences.
The choice of the victim himself deserves separate attention. It was not a random choice. The killing of Dugin and his daughter, judging by the above mentioned video on 1+1, were prepared long and carefully. And at the festival itself, during which the car was booby-trapped, the criminals could have chosen a different, “more military” target, but they did not.
The choice may suggest that the masters of the Kiev regime see for themselves a serious threat in the “neo-Eurasian” ideas of which Alexander Dugin has been the main intellectual guide of late.
Within the academic community in the social sciences, the tone of debate in recent years has largely been set by liberal “progressives” and post-Marxists. Both have looked at the civilizational approach, of which Eurasianism is in fact one strand, with a condescending sneer, while its local supporters have been cast as “cranks”.
But those think tanks that guided the hand of Daria Dugina’s killers seem to think quite differently, and see a serious threat in the Russian population ceasing to believe in the universal universal human values of the modern era dictated by the West.
Moreover, against the background of the Russian Armed Forces’ special military operation to defend Donbass, there is every reason to reflect on the value-civilisation component of the Ukrainian conflict, which cannot be explained by either economic or structural-political preconditions. However, the thesis that Ukraine is in a place of “civilisational rift” can put a lot in its place.
Svyatoslav Knyazev, RuBaltic.ru
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