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The Russian Internal Security Service (FSB) has officially accused Ukraine of a car bomb in Moscow that killed the daughter of Putin’s main ally Alexander Dugin on Monday.
Ukrainian officials denied any involvement. The Russian FSB says the attack was both targeted at Dugin and “prepared and carried out by Ukrainian special services”.
The intelligence organization claims that a Ukrainian citizen, Natalia Vovk, carried out the attack before fleeing the country to Estonia. Vovk would enter Russia on July 23 with her 12-year-old daughter, Sofia Shaban, and she would rent an apartment in the same building as Dugina.
The FSB claims that Vovk used three separate license plates during his time in Moscow. She entered Russia using the license plates of the so-called Dontesk People’s Republic, a rebel Ukrainian state. While she was in Moscow, she used plates from Kazakhstan and fled the country using Ukrainian plates, according to the FSB.
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In this photo taken on Thursday 11 August 2016, Alexander Dugin, the neo-Eurasian ideologue, sits in his TV studio in central Moscow, Russia. The daughter of this Russian nationalist ideologue, often called “Putin’s brain,” was killed when his car exploded on the outskirts of Moscow, officials said on Sunday, Aug. 21, 2022.
(Photo AP / Francesca Ebel, File)
Daria Dugina, a 29-year-old nationalist columnist, was killed Saturday night while driving her father’s SUV. She was leaving a festival after listening to her father, a prominent Russian political theorist and philosopher, deliver a speech on Russian history and tradition.
Dugin is one of Russia’s top supporters for the invasion of Ukraine and has earned the nickname “Putin’s brain” for his close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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Dugin was reportedly supposed to be in the vehicle with his daughter, but at the last minute he chose to travel in another vehicle.
The FSB’s word shouldn’t be fully trusted, and the incentive for quick results may have hindered the organization’s accuracy, Rebekah Koffler, strategic intelligence expert and author of Putin’s Playbook, told Fox News Digital.
“We cannot fully trust the FSB. Never. That does not mean that the results of their preliminary investigation into Daria Dugina’s death are wrong.” Koffler said. “The FSB is under tremendous pressure to get quick results, as this is a very high profile death,”
“Daria Dugina is not a normal individual. She, like her father, is a symbol of the ideology of ‘The Russian World’, which is a spin-off of Eurasianism, of which her father is the thought leader”, he added. “It is the ideology on which Putin based his entire geopolitical and security strategy. Putin is almost certainly heavily invested in this investigation and would like to show a quick response, so there is a likelihood of a wrong analysis.”
Ukraine urged its government employees to stay home this week for fear of retaliatory attacks.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had already warned on Saturday that Russia may be planning something “particularly bad” as Ukraine prepares to celebrate its Independence Day on Wednesday.
“We should be aware that this week Russia may be trying to do something particularly bad, something particularly cruel. Such is our enemy. But in any other week during these six months, Russia has always done the same thing: disgusting and cruel, ”Zelenskyy said during a video speech on Saturday.
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“One of the key tasks of the enemy is to humiliate us Ukrainians, devalue our abilities, our heroes, spread despair, fear, spread conflict … Therefore, it is important never to give, for a single moment, in this enemy pressure, not charge, show no weakness, “he added.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
