The Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB's successor counterintelligence body, charged Ukrainian Natalia Vovk yesterday with the murder of Daria Duguina on Saturday night. The murdered young woman was the eldest daughter of Alexander Dugin, a writer, philosopher and political theorist whose exact relationship with Vladimir Putin is unknown, but the influence of his expansionist and ultra-nationalist rhetoric in speeches and interventions is unknown.
Yesterday the Russian president described the murder as an "ignoble crime" and said of her that "as a journalist, scientist, philosopher and war correspondent, she has served the people and the homeland with sincerity, illustrating with her actions what it means to be a patriot Russian".
"The death was prepared and perpetrated by the Ukrainian special services," says the FSB note. According to this version, Natalia Vovk, born in 1979, and her 12-year-old daughter entered Russia in July and settled in an apartment in the building where the deceased lived. The attack took place in the town of Bolchïe Viaziomuy, forty kilometers from Moscow, where a traditionalist cultural event was being held, to which she had attended with her father. At the end, and according to several testimonies, the writer would have decided to return in another car and left the SUV that his daughter usually drove.
According to the FSB, the Ukrainian Vovk and her daughter participated in the festival and disappeared minutes after the attack. They changed the license plates of the car they were driving and headed for Estonia. In Russian digital close to the security services it was stated that the Ukrainian was a member of the Azov battalion.
The bomb attack refers to the turbulent decade of the nineties in Moscow, years of explosions and settling scores between the mafias of which citizens have horrible memories. The effects of Duguina's death will be important on Russian collective psychology. After months of official propaganda claiming that the "special operation" in Ukraine was not going to have any effect on normalcy in Russia, the drone strikes in Crimea and the crime on Saturday disprove this and have made the conflict highly visible. Against this background, Russian nationalists called on the Kremlin to respond to death by stepping up bombers.
The nationalist fervor was such yesterday that Margarita Simonian, editor-in-chief of RT, tweeted that she suspected that Estonia was not going to allow Vovk's extradition and invited "send people to admire the spiers of Tallinn", which was interpreted as a reference for sending agents to poison the Skripal family in the UK in 2018.
In a statement released by people close to Duguin, he describes his daughter as a "rising star" treacherously murdered. “Our hearts do not ask for revenge. What we need is just victory.”
Dugin has been a promoter of the "Russian world", a spiritual and political concept that emphasizes Russia as a pious country and defender of traditional values and strong leadership, while despising the liberal values of the West. Dugin has vehemently supported sending troops to Ukraine and has urged the Kremlin to increase the scale of its operations in the country. It was Dugin who popularized the concept of "Novorossiya" or "New Russia", used to justify the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and support for the rebels in the Ukrainian Donbass.
The writer has been subject to sanctions by the United States and the European Union, as has his daughter, who shared the same ideas as her father, according to her public appearances as a commentator for the nationalist television channel Tsargrad, for which the father was editor-in-chief. Duguina, for her part, was editor-in-chief of United World International, a website that the United States described as a source of intoxication.
When Duguina was sanctioned, it was accompanied as justification by an article published this year in which he stated that Ukraine must “perish” if it is admitted to NATO. In a television appearance last Thursday, the late she stated that "people in the West live in a dream, the dream of living in global hegemony." She called America a "zombie society."
On Sunday, the special adviser to the Ukrainian presidency, Mikhailo Podoliak, denied any involvement of Ukraine in the murder. Hours later, Danis Pushilin, head of the pro-Russian Donetsk separatists and a personal friend of Dugin, immediately accused the "Ukrainian terrorist regime" of trying to assassinate the ideologue.
