Car bombing amplifies tensions

Ukraine denies Russian accusations that special agent committed crime.

Moving quickly to assign blame, Russia on Monday declared Ukrainian intelligence responsible for the brazen car bombing that killed the daughter of a leading right-wing Russian political thinker over the weekend. Ukraine denied involvement.

What happened

Daria Dugina, a 29-yearold commentator with a nationalist Russian TV channel, died when a remotely controlled explosive device planted in her SUV blew up on Saturday night as she was driving on the outskirts of Moscow, ripping the vehicle apart and killing her on the spot, authorities said.

Her father, Alexander Dugin, a philosopher, writer and political theorist who ardently supports Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to send troops into Ukraine, was widely believed to be the intended target. Russian media quoted witnesses as saying that the SUV belonged to Dugin and that he had decided at the last minute to travel in another vehicle.

What Russia says

Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main successor to the KGB, said Dugina’s killing was “prepared and perpetrated by the Ukrainian special services.”

The FSB said a Ukrainian citizen, Natalya Vovk, carried out the killing and then fled to Estonia.

In Estonia, the prosecutor general’s office said in a statement carried by the Baltic News Services that it “has not received any requests or inquiries from the Russian authorities on this topic.”

The FSB said Vovk arrived in Russia in July with her 12-year-old daughter and rented an apartment in the building where Dugina lived in order to shadow her. It said Vovk and her daughter were at a nationalist festival Dugin and his daughter attended just before the killing.

Ukraine’s presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak denied any Ukrainian involvement in the bombing. In a tweet, he dismissed the FSB claims as fiction.

In a statement, Dugin described his daughter as a “rising star” who was “treacherously killed by enemies of Russia.”

“Our hearts are longing not just for revenge and retaliation. It would be too petty, not in Russia style,” Dugin wrote. “We need only victory.”

About Russia’s response

The car bombing, unusual for Moscow since the gang wars of the turbulent 1990s, triggered calls from Russian nationalists to respond by ramping up strikes on Ukraine.

Sergei Markov, a pro-kremlin political analyst, argued that the perpetrators of Dugina’s killing might have hoped to encourage a split between those in the Russian elite who advocate a political compromise to end the hostilities in Ukraine and proponents of even tougher military action.

Dugin, dubbed “Putin’s brain” and “Putin’s Rasputin” by some in the West, has been a prominent proponent of the “Russian world” concept, a spiritual and political ideology that emphasizes traditional values, the restoration of Russia’s global influence and the unity of all ethnic Russians throughout the world.

AP FILE In a statement, Alexander Dugin, the neo-eurasianist ideologue, said his daughter was “treacherously killed by enemies of Russia” and the hearts of those who knew her long for more than revenge and retaliation.