Lee Heidhues 8.22.2022
I want to learn all I can about the car bombing assassination of Darya Dugina as she drove from a wealthy Moscow suburb on August 20, 2022.
The Western media; New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC and Deutsche Welle are giving this blatant political hit major coverage.
It’s worthwhile to learn more by reading the Moscow Times which offers up a point of view not found in Putin controlled State Media. This is a major story which will have an impact on the now six month old war of aggression against Ukraine.
As expected the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has already fingered an unlikely suspect. Kremlin watchers are scoffing at the FSB analysis.
What remains unknown is, “Who is really responsible?” We may never get an answer to that question.
Excerpted from Moscow Times 8.22.2022
Russia said Monday that Ukraine was responsible for carrying out a car bombing that killed Darya Dugina, the adult daughter of nationalist ideologue and Ukraine war supporter Alexander Dugin, as experts said the assassination would likely spook Kremlin loyalists.
The high-profile assassination — of which her father Alexander Dugin is thought to have been the intended target — has sent shockwaves through the Russian elite, with political experts suggesting it has likely made pro-war pundits and Kremlin supporters fearful for their lives.
Dugina, 29, died Saturday evening when a car bomb exploded in the Toyota Land Cruiser she was driving near Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin described the incident Monday as a “vile crime” shortly before the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said the person responsible was a Ukrainian woman named Natala Vovk.
In a condolence message, Putin described Dugina as “a Russian patriot.”
“The fact that Dugina was an ordinary political commentator expands the geography of fear — pro-Kremlin speakers will understand the war is not an abstraction and it threatens them personally,” political analyst Abbas Gallyamov told The Moscow Times.
A Ukrainian presidential adviser, Mykhaylo Podolyak, denied that Kyiv was behind the bombing, suggesting instead it was the result of Russian political infighting.
“Vipers in the Russian special services started an intraspecies fight,” he tweeted Monday.
At the same time, the killing provoked an outpouring of anger from Russian officials and pro-Kremlin pundits, who expressed few doubts Ukraine was behind the killing.
Russian state TV Channel One anchor Olesya Loseva said on prime time television that the targeting of Dugina was an “act of intimidation” and a “signal to all of us.”
State media journalist and war correspondent Alexander Sladkov said “it is impossible not to use the terrible crime as an excuse to confirm the worldwide threat of the Kyiv regime.”
The killing is likely to trigger “a radicalization of the conservative camp, which has lost one of ‘its own’ and craves revenge,” political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya said in a tweet Sunday.
In a statement carried by Russian news agencies, the FSB outlined Monday its version of how the attack was carried out by Ukrainian intelligence.
According to the FSB, Vovk arrived in Russia last month and rented an apartment in the same building where Dugina lived. She supposedly tailed Dugina in a Mini Cooper using a series of different license plates, fleeing to neighboring Estonia after the killing took place.
Lee's Perspective 