This article from the Times covers most of it, albeit with the usual western Russophobic slant on it:
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Russia claims Ukrainian intelligence was behind car bomb that killed Darya DuginaMoscow has accused a Ukrainian intelligence officer of killing the daughter of an ultra-nationalist philosopher who had backed the invasion of Ukraine, even as a former opposition MP claimed that dissident Russians were behind the car bombing.
The FSB, Russia's internal security service, alleged that the bomb that killed Darya Dugina, 29, on Saturday night was planted by Natalia Vovk, who it said was 42 or 43 years old. It said she had been accompanied on her mission by her daughter, Sofia Shaban, aged 12 or 13.
It said Vovk had used a Mini Cooper to tail Dugina, who was driving on a highway near Moscow when her car exploded. It also alleged that she had rented an apartment in the same building as Dugina. The FSB said that Vovk and her daughter fled to Estonia after the attack.
The FSB did not explain why a Ukrainian agent who had been tasked with assassinating a pro-Kremlin figure would bring along her young daughter. Pro-Kremlin media alleged that Vovk was a member of Azov, a Ukrainain military regiment with far-right roots.
Dugina had been with her father, Alexander Dugin, at an event shortly before the blast. It is believed that he was the intended target. Dugin, who has been called "Putin's brain", is widely seen as having influenced the Kremlin's aggressive foreign policy.
Ukraine has denied involvement in the attack and Ilya Ponomarev, a former opposition Russian MP, said that internal groups opposed to Putin's rule were behind the bomb.
Dugin said today that his daughter was "brutally murdered" in what he described as a "terrorist act by the Ukrainian Nazi regime". He also said she had sacrificed her life for a Russian military victory in Ukraine. "She was a beautiful Orthodox woman," he said.
President Putin described Dugina as a true Russian patriot and said her death was a "vile, cruel crime". Speaking on Russia's Flag Day holiday, Putin also portrayed her as "a bright, talented person with a real Russian heart %u2014 kind, loving, sympathetic and open."
Ponomarev, who fled to Ukraine after opposing the Kremlin's annexation of Crimea in 2014, said a group of Russian partisan fighters known as the National Republican Army (NRA) had claimed responsibility for the bombing. He added that the group had carried out about a dozen arson attacks on military recruitment centres across Russia.
"This act, like many other partisan actions carried out on the territory of Russia in recent months, was carried out by the NRA," Ponomarev, 47, said during a broadcast by February Morning, his Kiev-based media outlet. "This attack opens a new page in Russian resistance to Putinism. New %u2014 but not the last."
He then read out a manifesto that he said he had been given by the NRA. "Our goal is to stop the destruction of Russia and its neighbours," it read. "We will depose and destroy Putin! Long live Free Russia!"
The NRA also said it would target pro-Putin officials, Kremlin-linked businessmen and members of the army and the security services to "cleanse our motherland of filth".
Ponomarev said he supported the NRA and defended the group's right to launch violent attacks inside Russia. "The war is a colossal crime," he wrote on Telegram, the messaging app. "There are people who consider it right to punish the initiators of the war and its ideologists. They do what they think is right."
It was impossible to verify Ponomarev's claims about the existence of the NRA. However, his February Morning online channel, which was launched after the Kremlin ordered tanks into Ukraine, has previously called for violent resistance against Putin's regime.
Its Rospartizan project on Telegram offers advice on how to produce improvised weapons and urges attacks on government buildings. "Non-violent methods never lead to the fall of such regimes," Fedor Klimenko, the outlet's editor, told The Times last month.
Pro-Kremlin figures accused Ponomarev, who has been a Ukrainian citizen since 2019, of seeking to cover up for Ukraine's SBU security service, which they alleged was behind the car bombing. Vladimir Dzhabarov, the deputy head of the upper house's foreign affairs committee, said Ponomarev's claims of an underground resistance group were "nonsense".
There were also calls for violent retribution against the former MP. Yevgeny Primakov, a Russian government official who heads an organisation that is responsible for Russians living abroad, called for a "competition for the best video or photo of Ponomarev crawling on broken legs and apologising, while spitting out his teeth".
Although he holds no official government post, Dugin, a former professor at Moscow State University, has advocated an imperialist theory called Eurasianism, which calls on the Russian government to unite ethnic Russians and reject western, European values. His daughter was a journalist and political commentator with similar views, and both were sanctioned in the West over their support for the invasion of Ukraine.
Dugin arrived at the scene of the blast soon afterwards and was seen clutching his head in despair. He is believed to have been taken to hospital with heart problems.
The attack, which took place near an area of Moscow's suburbs that is home to the Russian elite, will make the promoters of Kremlin propaganda extremely nervous, said Abbas Gallyamov, a political analyst.
"Many people today have suddenly realised that war is not some talk show. No, war is something very concrete and something that concerns you personally," he wrote on Facebook. "The propaganda machine will start to lose momentum."
Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian analyst, said Dugina's death could lead to Putin losing the support of ultra-nationalists who believe that the president has been too "weak" on Ukraine. A number of hardline figures have expressed anger in recent weeks that Putin has not ordered large-scale missile attacks on central Kiev, including on government and security service offices.
"Dugina's assassination creates conditions in which a political demand for a more radicalised political leadership than Putin is formed," she wrote. "And the Kremlin will not be able to meet it."
Denis Pushilin, the pro-Kremlin leader of the Donetsk People's Republic, the separatist region in eastern Ukraine, had earlier blamed Kiev for the killing. He posted a photograph of Dugina online and wrote: "Vile scoundrels! The terrorists of the Ukrainian regime, trying to eliminate Alexander Dugin, blew up his daughter . . . in a car. Blessed memory of Darya, she is a real Russian girl!"
Kiev denied involvement. An aide to President Zelensky said that Ukraine was "not a criminal state like Russia".
Dugin had spent the early evening at a conservative "family" arts festival in a quiet village outside Moscow, where he gave a lecture entitled Tradition and History. He was about to get into his Toyota Land Cruiser with his daughter when he decided to follow on behind in another vehicle instead %u2014 and handed her the keys to the Toyota.
Investigators said the bomb was placed on the bottom of the car, under the driver's seat.
Dugin's name was added to western sanctions lists for his support of Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014. His daughter was sanctioned by the US Treasury in March over an article on the United World International website claiming that Ukraine would "perish" if it were admitted to Nato. Britain sanctioned her last month as a "frequent and high-profile contributor of misinformation" on Ukraine.
In one of her last appearances on state television, Dugina described Ukrainian soldiers who were taken captive by Russia in Mariupol in April as "non-humans." She also said the war in Ukraine was a "battle of civilisations".
There is little doubt that Alexander Dugin, a former occultist and far-right thinker who once urged President Putin to "kill, kill, kill" Ukrainians, is one of the most notorious pro-Kremlin figures (Marc Bennetts writes). Yet the exact extent of his influence over Russian foreign policy is unclear.
He is a prolific writer whose books are a mixture of mysticism and ultra-nationalism. His Foundations of Geopolitics was made required reading for Russian military officials after the Kremlin annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
"Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness," he wrote in the book. Last year Putin also referenced some of Dugin's ideas in a lengthy essay on Ukraine that is now viewed as a blueprint for Russia's invasion.
Dugin, whose long, flowing hair and beard have prompted comparisons to Rasputin, was fascinated with the occult in the 1980s and the 1990s, a period of turbulent social change in Moscow. He is said to have been a member of the "Black Order of the SS", a group of far-right Russian mystics who are believed to have experimented with drugs and sex magic.
In the early 1990s, Dugin became editor of the magazine Elementy, whose front cover once featured a portrait of Baphomet, the goat god who is also the symbol of the US-based Church of Satan. In one article he hailed the "spiritual and transcendental side of fascism".
In 1995 he took part in a performance in St Petersburg in memory of the British occultist Aleister Crowley. The event featured readings of Crowley's seminal work of occult literature, the Book of the Law. A spokeswoman said in 2015, however, that Dugin was a devout Russian Orthodox Christian who had only dabbled with the occult out of "intellectual curiosity".
Alexander Dugin is said to have been a member of the "Black Order of the SS", a group of far-right Russian mystics
Dugin first entered politics in the 1990s, when he co-founded the National Bolshevik Movement, an opposition movement that merged communist and fascist ideologies. The group's other leaders were Eduard Limonov, a firebrand writer, and Yegor Letov, the father of Russian punk.
Yet it was not until Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine that Dugin's ideas entered the mainstream and he was, albeit briefly, given a platform by state television to promote his hardline nationalist views. He was also willing to criticise Putin, however, warning that same year that the Russian leader would lose the support of "patriots" unless he openly deployed troops to eastern Ukraine to aid pro-Kremlin separatists. He was quickly dropped by state media.
Despite being described as "Putin's brain" by Foreign Affairs, an American magazine, Dugin is far from a household name in Russia. He is not known to have met Putin in person and he has never held a post within the government. Unlike Kremlin or security service officials, he travels without bodyguards. This is likely to have made him an attractive target for the people who planted the car bomb that killed his daughter, Darya, at the weekend.
After publicly calling for the slaughter of Ukrainians in 2014, Dugin was fired from his post as professor of international relations by Moscow State University when students launched a petition condemning his remarks. He is thought to have subsequently fallen on hard times, demanding %u20AC500 for face-to-face interviews with journalists.
Although his links to Putin may have been exaggerated, he is loathed in Ukraine and the car bombing in an elite residential area near Moscow that killed his daughter is likely to make other pro-Kremlin figures extremely jittery.
"Contrary to what is commonly believed in the West, Dugin is not a significant figure," Leonid Volkov, the chief aide to Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned Russian opposition leader, wrote. "But the symbolic significance of the assassination attempt on Dugin is enormous."
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My view: I doubt the Estonians will cough the murderer up to Russia, they will let her escape back to Ukraine. That will increase tension with Estonia. The mini she used (sans the three lots of fake numberplates she used that the Times didn't mention) is already advertised for sale by her relative. As Ukraine has been bombing some areas of Crimea in recent days and are now committing terrorist acts in Russia, this may change the balance of the conflict. Putin may decide to cut the head off the snake and move on Kiev now removing Zelensky altogether.
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