Each new claim over the attack that killed Darya Dugina seems to raise more questions than it answers.
On Monday, Russia’s FSB security service claimed to have cracked the case, publishing information and a video it said showed a Ukrainian woman from the country’s Azov regiment was responsible for the murder of Dugina, whose father is the far-right ideologue Alexander Dugin.
According to the FSB, the assassin managed to enter Russia with her 12-year-old daughter in tow, move around undetected while frequently changing the plates on her Mini Cooper, plant and detonate a professional explosive device, and leave the country.
Supposedly, she managed to do all this without being spotted by Russia’s security services until after she had fled, presumably by posing as one of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who have either sought refuge in Russia or been forcibly deported from occupied areas of Ukraine.
The FSB’s claims will be met with extreme scepticism, and Ukraine has strongly denied any involvement in the attack, pointing out that Dugin was a marginal figure and insisting it does not carry out this kind of mission.
But it is not impossible to imagine a motive for Kyiv: Dugina’s death came as Ukrainians are increasingly taking the fight to Russia in occupied Crimea for the first time since the invasion in February. Operations such as an audacious plan to lure a group of Russian mercenaries to Ukraine two years ago show that there are those in the Ukrainian services who like to think big.
Additionally, while it is true that Dugin is hardly the Putin-whisperer that some make him out to be, there is no doubt that he does have high name recognition both in Russia and the west, and he has made frequent, odious calls for violence against Ukraine and Ukrainians. If the calculation was for a high-profile target who was nonetheless reasonably vulnerable and had minimal security, Dugin would not be an illogical choice, assuming that he and not his daughter was the original intended target.
However, the speed with which the FSB has come up with video “evidence”, as well as several rather puzzling aspects of its story, certainly raise red flags. For an agency that has failed to solve numerous high-profile murders in Russia, including of Putin critics, the speed of the FSB’s work on this case is as suspicious as its lack of progress elsewhere.
Other versions of events floated also seem far from watertight. On Sunday, the former Russian MP Ilya Ponomarev, now living in exile in Kyiv, claimed that partisans from a hitherto-unknown group called the National Republican Army were behind the attack, adding an unexpected and intriguing dimension to the case. But Ponomarev did not provide any evidence, and many observers have dismissed the claim as a publicity stunt.
Officials in Ukraine have suggested the killing was more likely to be a “false flag” operation, organised by the Russian state in order to frame Ukraine and provide a justification for further violence. Certainly, it has done that: propagandists such as Margarita Simonyan of the television network RT have called for increased targeting of Ukraine and Ukrainians in the aftermath.
However, it is not clear that Russia needed any pretext to continue its aggression, and if the whole case was a set-up, it is one that makes the FSB and Russian state look curiously vulnerable and incompetent.
In the FSB’s version of events, a Ukrainian assassin was able to enter Russia, carry out a high-profile killing near the capital and then flee, all without being apprehended. The FSB footage shows the supposed assassin looking icily calm, with her young daughter in tow, as she enters and leaves Russia and moves around the capital.
If true, it is a shocking FSB failure and, if false, it is a strangely self-incriminating tale to invent.
