Who Murdered Darya Dugina and Why?

Alexander Dugin in front of his murdered daughter’s car.

Nobody knows who blew up Alexander Dugin’s car, killing his daughter Darya, or why. Ukraine denied responsibility. And it is not obvious cui bono?, who does it benefit?

Kremlinologist Mark Galeotti is as puzzled as the rest of us about the motives and the perpetrator(s), but he does think this crime may well reflect divisions within the Orcish Evil Empire.

[T]his is the Dugin paradox, he is Schrödinger’s Ideologist, at once important and also not. He may not have real traction with the government, but his capacity to present himself as a profound thinker whose (often barking mad) ideas frame Kremlin thinking means he is considered important. And if people think him important, then to a degree he becomes important. Or rather, the myth of Dugin does.

It is that myth which will likely matter in the aftermath of his daughter’s killing. Already, Russian nationalist tub-thumpers are calling for retaliation, but given that the Kremlin already seems to recognise no limits on its operations in Ukraine, it is unlikely it can or will do anything beyond the symbolic. A dead Dugin would have been a malleable martyr, an angry living one could prove a wild card. The man who once called for a Russia stretching ‘from Dublin to Vladivostok’ is unlikely to be assuaged and nationalists who are already dissatisfied with Putin – they don’t have a problem with him invading Ukraine, just with him doing it so very badly – will feel all the more reason to be angry.

We likely will see some hurried arrests. No doubt there will be video footage of Federal Security Service officers bursting into a flat artfully staged with some bomb-making equipment, a gun, a teach-yourself-Ukrainian handbook, some US dollars and, maybe, a volume of Shakespeare (seriously: one was used as ‘evidence’ of the presence of British mercenaries fighting for Ukraine, as we all know squaddies are mad for a little King Lear). But we, and more to the point, the Russians, have seen it all before. This is unlikely to bring closure or reassurance. Instead, it is just one more hint of the subterranean instabilities and weaknesses of a regime that tries to look indomitable.

Whether it reflects a serious failure of the Russian security state or tensions and rivalries within it, it will convince the nationalists – who may be less numerous and visible than Putin’s liberal critics, but tend to be within the security services and have, to be blunt, the guns – that this is a regime that is not living up to its own rhetoric and may be weaker than it looks.

RTWT

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Russian author says it was the GRU.