In today’s newsletter: After an ultranationalist’s daughter is killed in Moscow, people in Russia and the west are asking who did it – and what the Kremlin might do next. On Saturday, Darya Dugina, the daughter of the ultranationalist Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin, was killed by a car bomb in Moscow. Yesterday, Vladimir Putin called it a “vile, cruel crime”, and Moscow said that Ukraine was responsible. (…) On Saturday night, Alexander Dugin gave a lecture at a festival at an estate in Moscow dedicated to the kind of hard-right pro-war worldview he is known for. He and his daughter Darya Dugina left, apparently in different vehicles. About five minutes after Dugina left, the Toyota Land Cruiser she was driving was blown up by a car bomb. Footage circulated on social media appeared to show Dugin standing next to the wreckage in a state of distress. Reports in the Russian media on Monday claimed that an untraceable telephone may have been used to remotely detonate the device after it left a garage where CCTV had been switched off. They also claimed that the perpetrators may have been following the car when it blew up. It’s hard to assess some of these claims with any certainty, Andrew said. Russian authorities have given limited evidence to back up their version of events, “but that doesn’t discount it”. But we can say with confidence that Dugina died in an attack which may have been aimed at her father – and it appears to have been carefully planned. Who was Darya Dugina, and who is her father, Alexander Dugin? “Most analysts who heard the news immediately thought it was Alexander who had been targeted,” Andrew said. Dugin exults in the nickname “Putin’s Brain”; but while some people in Putin’s circle have read Dugin’s work, it is less clear that he has the kind of sway on the Russian leader that would justify that title. “He’s the kind of person you see on these gladiatorial screamathons you get on pro-Kremlin TV,” Andrew said. “But it’s important to understand that people like Dugin don’t make the final decisions – they’re just one pressure group in a complicated country.” As a rough comparison, think of some of the talking heads with tenuous links to the Trump administration who turn up on Fox News. Dugin’s politics are extreme: he is an ultranationalist who advocates for a new Russian empire. At the same time, Andrew said, he is “a political opportunist – I remember him requesting €500 to give interviews”
via guardian: Tuesday briefing: The mystery of the Moscow car bomb attack