Daria Dugina, a 29-year-outdated commentator with a nationalist Russian Tv channel, died when a remotely controlled explosive gadget planted in her SUV blew up on Saturday night time as she was driving on the outskirts of Moscow, ripping the vehicle apart and killing her on the spot, authorities reported.
Her father, Alexander Dugin, a thinker, writer and political theorist who ardently supports Russian President Vladimir Putin’s selection to send out troops into Ukraine, was greatly believed to be the intended concentrate on. Russian media quoted witnesses as indicating that the SUV belonged to Dugin and that he had determined at the very last moment to travel in one more car.
Russia’s Federal Security Company, or FSB, the main successor to the KGB, stated Dugina’s killing was “ready and perpetrated by the Ukrainian particular solutions.”
The FSB reported a Ukrainian citizen, Natalya Vovk, carried out the killing and then fled to Estonia.
In Estonia, the prosecutor general’s workplace claimed in a assertion carried by the Baltic Information Products and services that it “has not been given any requests or inquiries from the Russian authorities on this subject matter.”
The FSB explained Vovk arrived in Russia in July with her 12-calendar year-aged daughter and rented an apartment in the creating in which Dugina lived in buy to shadow her. It mentioned that Vovk and her daughter have been at a nationalist festival that Dugin and his daughter attended just right before the killing.
The agency introduced video of the suspect from surveillance cameras at the border crossings and at the entrance to the Moscow apartment setting up.
The FSB stated Vovk applied a license plate for Ukraine’s Russian-backed separatist Donetsk location to enter Russia and a Kazakhstan plate in Moscow right before switching to a Ukrainian a person to cross into Estonia.
Ukraine’s presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak denied any Ukrainian involvement in the bombing. In a tweet, he dismissed the FSB statements as fiction, casting them as section of infighting in between Russian protection companies.
In a letter extending condolences to Dugin and his spouse, Putin denounced the “cruel and treacherous” killing and included that Dugina “honestly served individuals and the Fatherland, proving what it signifies to be a patriot of Russia with her deeds.” He posthumously awarded Dugina the Purchase of Bravery, one of Russia’s optimum medals.
Russian Overseas Minisry spokeswoman Maria Zakharov reported Dugina’s killing reflected Kyiv’s reliance on “terrorism as an instrument of its felony ideology.”
In a statement, Dugin explained his daughter as a “soaring star” who was “treacherously killed by enemies of Russia.”
“Our hearts are longing not just for revenge and retaliation. It would be much too petty, not in Russia type,” Dugin wrote. “We will need only victory.”
The car bombing, unusual for Moscow because the gang wars of the turbulent 1990s, brought on calls from Russian nationalists to respond by ramping up strikes on Ukraine.
Sergei Markov, a professional-Kremlin political analyst, argued that the perpetrators of Dugina’s killing could have hoped to stimulate a split in between individuals in the Russian elite who advocate a political compromise to close the hostilities in Ukraine and proponents of even harder military services action.
Dugin, dubbed “Putin’s brain” and “Putin’s Rasputin” by some in the West, has been a outstanding proponent of the “Russian world” strategy, a religious and political ideology that emphasizes standard values, the restoration of Russia’s worldwide impact and the unity of all ethnic Russians all over the world.
Dugin served popularize the “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia” concept that Russia applied to justify the 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and its aid of separatist rebels in jap Ukraine. He has urged the Kremlin to stage up its operations in Ukraine.
Dugin has also promoted authoritarian leadership in Russia and spoken with disdain of liberal Western values. He has been slapped with U.S. and European Union sanctions.
His daughter expressed very similar sights and experienced appeared as a commentator on the Tv channel Tsargrad, exactly where Dugin had served as chief editor.
Dugina herself was sanctioned by the U.S. in March for her get the job done as main editor of United Planet Global, a web-site that Washington has explained as a resource of disinformation.
In an appearance on Russian tv previous week, Dugina referred to as America “a zombie modern society” the place men and women oppose Russia but can’t find it on a map.