Russia has accused Ukraine of having committed the attack that killed Daria Dugina, daughter of Russian ultranationalist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, which took place on Saturday (20) outside Moscow.
The accusation is both predictable, given the belligerence between the Kremlin and the neighbor it invaded nearly six months ago, and surprising, as it is a rare admission of a breach of internal security — which can generate an unprecedented sense of vulnerability at the heart of power. Russian.
According to the FSB (Federal Security Service, the main successor agency of the Soviet KGB), the attacker is a Ukrainian woman born in 1979 named Natalia Vovk, who arrived in Moscow in July with her daughter Sofia, 12.
She was in the service of the Ukrainian special forces, the FSB said, and moved into the same apartment block where Dugina lived, and began to study her way of life.
On Saturday, the agency says, Vovk and Sofia went to the nationalist festival Tradição, which Dugina and Dugin were at. Authorities say she blew up the ideologue’s daughter’s Land Cruiser Prado remotely and fled through the Pskov region to Ukraine.
She had entered Russia in a Mini Cooper with plates from the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk, a Ukrainian territory under pro-Russian control since 2014 and whose recognition in February by Vladimir Putin predated the war. In Moscow, the plates were switched to one from Kazakhstan and, leaving the country for Estonia, were switched back to a Ukrainian number, the FSB said.
The degree of detail gathered in such a short time suggests an unparalleled investigative efficiency, which should raise doubts among Kremlin critics. To this day, the FSB grapples with unproven suspicions about the wave of bomb attacks blamed on Chechens in 1999 that prompted Moscow’s second war against Islamic insurgents from that Caucasian republic — cementing Putin’s rise to power.
Dugin is sold abroad as something of a Putin guru, which is an exaggeration. He professes ultra-nationalist views that have, at different times, married the ideologies current in the Kremlin. But his influence over the president was never attested.
Even his most radical views of Russian expansion were seen as such, and he is a side figure in Russian debates. In favor of the idea of ​​relative importance of Dugin and Dugina, who as a political commentator followed his father, there is the Ukrainian War and its expansionist effects.
For Kiev, the attack ends up being part of the attacks carried out on a one-off basis against military and infrastructure targets in Crimea, a peninsula whose annexation in 2014 after the overthrow of the pro-Kremlin government in Ukraine inaugurated hostilities now in full swing. The most serious was against an air base, which destroyed several fighter planes.
On the other hand, the rise of tension is visible in a symbolic week. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky banned any celebrations and gatherings of people in the capital from Monday until Wednesday (24), when the country’s independence from the Soviet Union, which took place in 1991, is celebrated.
The same day marks the six months since the beginning of the Russian invasion, which in practice seeks to close the chapter opened 31 years ago. Kiev said it feared an intensification of missile attacks this week, and on Monday five of them were launched against Odessa (southern country).
Zelensky said on Sunday night that Russia “could try something particularly ugly”. There have been no peace talks since April, and in an interview with the British newspaper Financial Times, the Russian ambassador to the UN in Geneva said the chance of talks is nil now.
Finally, fighting continues in the region of the Zaporijia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, with both sides accusing each other of bombing areas near the complex.
