RURAL RUMINATIONS
WHO MURDERED DARYA DUGINA?
August 31, 2022
By Haviland Smith
Darya Dugina and her father Alexander have long been passionate supporters of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his policies, particularly the goal of reestablishing the boundaries of old imperial Russia and the USSR. In fact, Alexander is often called “Putin’s brain”. Both were fervently in favor of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Before we get into who did what to whom, let’s have a quick look on the “whom” part of that. Reporting from TASS in Moscow indicates the very real possibility that the real target of the assassination attempt was not Darya Dugina, but rather her father, Alexander Dugin.
A Russian friend of Dugina told TASS that he believed Alexander was the true target of the blast – or possibly both of them – as the car belonged to Alexander, not to Darya. Further, it was unexpected and out of pattern that she would drive his car on that particular day.
“It’s her father’s car,” Andrej Krasnov told TASS. “Dasha (Darya) drives another car, but she drove his car today, and Alexander went separately,” Krasnov is head of the Russky Gorizont (Russian Horizon) social movement and a personal acquaintance of Dugina’s family.
This comment, at minimum, opens the possibility that the killers got either the wrong Dugin or only half of their Dugin target.
Who could have run this operation? Russian dissidents and Ukrainians come immediately to mind largely because of the target. If the target had been Putin, the list of possible perpetrators could have been far more extensive. However, the fact that Dugina was the target really does narrow the possibilities.
There are probably not many countries in the world where a political assassination could be more difficult and demanding to pull off than in Russia. The pervasiveness of their security apparatus, particularly when it comes to the existence of opposing internal political movements, has their security service going 24/7.
If the perpetrators were Russian, they were obviously in the anti-Putin group and thus probably under pretty tight scrutiny. On the other hand, if they were such Russian dissidents, they would have had the kind of experience and knowledge of their environment that would have been mandatory for such an operation to be successful.
The Ukrainians have been remarkably successful defending their country against an overwhelmingly large Russian military force, but they have done this at home in Ukraine. For them to have pulled off an extraordinarily difficult assassination in Russia would have taken a level of experience that one has to suspect they likely could not have had.
Given the realities of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, it is tempting (and probably logical) to think the Ukrainians are the likely culprits.
However, the ongoing conflict between those two countries has created an environment that might well tempt a violent, anti-Putin domestic Russian group to run an operation which they would not have considered had it not been for the ongoing war,
Such a nasty war gives pretty good cover for these sorts of things.
Haviland Smith retired as a CIA operations officer and station chief over 40 years ago. He served in East and West Europe and the Middle East where he focused on the Soviet and Satellite targets.