Foundations of Suspicion

“What reason is there for us to do this?” 

                                   – A Ukrainian official speaking on the murder of Darya Dugina

On the evening of August 20, Darya Dugina, a Russian commentator and daughter of well-known Russian ultra-nationalist Aleksandr Dugin, was murdered by a car bomb.

The attack occurred while Dugina was leaving a festival at the Alexander Pushkin Museum-Reserve, which is situated in an elite Moscow postal code. Her father had planned to be in the car with her, but changed his mind at the last moment.

Shortly after the attack occurred, the Russian authorities began an investigation. They now claim that Dugina was murdered by a Ukrainian woman who fled to Estonia after the attack.

Ukraine denies any involvement and claims that most Ukrainian citizens neither know nor care about Dugina or her father, who is suspected to have been the intended target.

The Dugins are known in Russia for their ultra-nationalist views and anti-Western rhetoric, and many experts believe President Vladimir Putin is an adherent Alexander Dugin's nationalist ideas, and that such beliefs about building a wider "Russky Mir" united by Orthodoxy and the Russian language, helped drive the Kremlin toward its war on Ukraine.

In Dugina's final television appearance, she claimed that the atrocities of Bucha were staged to turn the world against Russia.