by DAVID P. GOLDMAN
Western media is spinning the August 20 car bombing of Darya Dugina, the daughter of“Eurasionist” ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, as an attack on Vladimir Putin’s“spiritual guide” (CNN) and“brain” (Foreign Affairs) – implicitly a violent blow against the Putin regime.
That fits the longstanding and long-discredited view promoted by Western chancelleries that the Russian president won’t survive the Ukraine war due to growing domestic opposition.
This self-serving reading of the murder—repeatedly endlessly in the English-language media– doesn’t square with the known facts or best-practice inference. Although information remains fragmentary, what we do know makes clear that the origin and intent of the Dugina assassination must be sought elsewhere.
What we know, or can infer with a high degree of certainty, is the following: Aleksandr Dugin is not a Putin ally, but a strident critic of Putin’s stance toward the West. Dugin himself was the target of the assassination, not his daughter; the young woman had the misfortune to drive her father’s car after a speaking event in Moscow while her father rode in a different vehicle. The bombing was amateurish, the work of either terror cells or ordinary criminals, according to sources with knowledge of the thinking of Russian security services. The Russian state knows how to eliminate undesirables, and they do so in more efficient ways—and do not miss.“If Putin wanted to kill Dugin,” said one analyst familiar with state security methods,“it would have been done differently, and for sure.” It is unlikely in the extreme that the Ukraine government carried out the bombing, as a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry speculated.
Eliminate the impossible, as Sherlock Holmes said, and what remains, however improbable, must be true. Russian opponents of Putin—such as they are—had no reason to kill a messianic ideologue who had become an annoyance to the Russian leader.
Putin might have had a reason to eliminate Dugin, but the bungled operation is most uncharacteristic of state security. If criminals were involved, the contract on Dugin could have been ordered anywhere in the world.
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