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A top Ukrainian official says the country had nothing to do with a Saturday car bombing in Moscow that killed the daughter of an influential, pro-war Russian thinker Tuesday.
The Moscow car bombing killed Daria Dugina, 29, while she was driving her father’s SUV. Her father is Alexander Dugin, an influential Russian thinker some have dubbed “Putin’s brain.” Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council secretary Oleksiy Danilov rejected accusations from the FSB that Ukrainian operators were to blame for the attack. Danilov argued that the FSB was in fact responsible for the bombing and is trying to scapegoat Ukraine.
“We don’t work in this way,” Danilov reportedly told Ukrainian TV. “We have more important tasks for our boys and girls … The FSB did this and is now suggesting that one of our people did it.”
Russia’s FSB says the attack was both targeted at Dugin and “prepared and perpetrated by the Ukrainian special services.”
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Journalist and political expert Darya Dugina, daughter of Russian politologist Alexander Dugin, is pictured in the Tsargrad TV studio in Moscow, Russia, in this undated handout image obtained by Reuters on August 21, 2022.
(Tsargrad.tv/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS – THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES. MANDATORY CREDIT.)
The intelligence organization says a Ukrainian citizen, Natalia Vovk, carried out the attack before fleeing the country to Estonia. Vovk allegedly entered Russia on July 23 with her 12-year-old daughter, Sofia Shaban, and reportedly rented an apartment in the same building as Dugina.
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The FSB alleges that Vovk used three separate license plates during her time in Moscow. She entered Russia using plates from the so-called Dontesk People’s Republic, a Ukrainian rebel state. While in Moscow, she used plates from Kazakhstan, and she fled the country using Ukrainian plates, according to the FSB.
Dugina was leaving a festival after listening to her father deliver a speech on Russian tradition and history. Dugin was reportedly supposed to be in the vehicle with his daughter but chose to ride in another vehicle at the last minute.
Russian politologist Alexander Dugin gestures as he addresses the rally “Battle for Donbas” in support of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, in Moscow, Russia October 18, 2014.
(Moscow News Agency/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS – THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. MANDATORY CREDIT.)
FSB’s word should not be fully trusted, and the incentive for speedy results may have hampered the organization’s accuracy, Rebekah Koffler, a strategic intelligence expert and author of “Putin’s Playbook” told Fox News Digital on Monday.
“We cannot fully trust the FSB. Ever. That doesn’t mean that the results of their preliminary investigation of Daria Dugina’s death is incorrect.” Koffler said. “The FSB is under tremendous pressure to deliver some quick results, given that this is a super high-profile death.”
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“Daria Dugina is not an ordinary individual. She, like her father, is a symbol of the ideology of ‘The Russian World,’ which is a spin-off of Eurasianism, that her father is the thought leader for,” she added. “It is the ideology that Putin has based his entire geopolitical and security strategy around. Putin is almost certainly highly invested in this investigation, and he would want to show a swift response, hence the probability of mistaken analysis is there.”
