The daughter of an extremely influential Russian philosopher who is known to have very close ties to Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, was killed this past weekend via a car bomb.
29-year-old Daria Dugina died due to the SUV that she was driving, which belonged to her father, violently exploded in an area roughly 20 miles to the west of the city of Moscow.
The daughter of 60-year-old Aleksandr Dugin, Dugina is a self-educated philosopher who sports a jingoistic mindset regarding foreign policy and his need for Russia to continue to expand its borders.
As reported by The New York Times, he is often called “Putin’s brain” or “Putin’s Philosopher.” Dugina was known to share her father’s ideals and was widely known to be a propagandist working with the state media.
Many officials seem to believe that the bomb was set in place to try and kill Dugin himself, instead of his daughter. Dugin was able to skirt around the alleged assassination attempt at the very last second when he chose to ride in another vehicle.
Russia quickly tried to spin the incident to blame Ukraine for the death. One official for Ukraine outright denied the assertation that the country was involved in the bombing at all. No one has, as of writing, claimed responsibility for the attack.
“Ukraine certainly had nothing to do with yesterday’s explosion,” stated one adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, this past Sunday. “We are not a criminal state like the Russian Federation, much less a terrorist one.”
Both the United States and the United Kingdom have issued sanctions against Dugina this year for their role in being a “frequent and high-profile contributor of disinformation related to Ukraine.”
The Treasury of the United States claimed that Dugin actually controls a fringe website that “serves as a platform for Russian ultra-nationalists to spread disinformation and propaganda targeting Western and other audiences” including accused NATO and the United States of trying to spark an explosive war with Russia to “further terrorize the American people in all sorts of malicious ways.”