If we look back, at a series of attacks attributed to some Chechen terrorists but most likely orchestrated by Russian intelligence services, at the episode that won Putin his first presidential mandate, and at the comparative costs and benefits for Kyiv and the Kremlin, the hypothesis of The “fake” subversion of the FSB brand should be taken seriously

Who is responsible for the murder of Oleksandr Dugin’s daughter? There is an official explanation from the authorities in Moscow, which raises serious questions, and many scenarios, some of which are frankly fantastic. And what will be its impact on the economy of the war in Ukraine, as well as on the internal territories of the Russian Federation?

Investigative bodies and special services in Moscow, which in other cases, such as the murder of Boris Nemtsov, who was killed in 2015 on a bridge near the Kremlin, or the journalist Alina Politkovskaya, who was killed in 2006, were unable to find the masterminds of the shootings, this time they were extremely efficient : the attack was the handiwork of Natalia Vovk in the service of the Ukrainian special services.

Many, not only outside Russia, but also inside believe that this is rather a so-called “fake” operation organized by the FSB. This hypothesis is supported by the head of the Estonian think tank Indrek Kannik, who believes that Kyiv can be conveniently blamed for the murder and, moreover, his country can also be drawn into this dispute. Estonia, which former Russian president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev said he deeply regretted “letting go,” recently suffered its worst cyber attack in 15 years after a tank monument was removed in the eastern city of Narva Soviet times. , not far from the border with Russia. About this attack, Urmas Reinsalu, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Estonia, says that it is part of typical operations of pressure and intimidation by Moscow on Tallinn, which provides substantial support to Ukraine (more, per capita, than all other countries).

In the article from The Moscow Timesthe publication, which has been banned in Russia for several years and is now published in Amsterdam, quotes Lyubov Sobol, who is a member of the Anti-Corruption Foundation together with Oleksiy Navalny, who, in turn, wrote on Twitter: “in the first moment the crime didn’t seem to make any sense – no one cared about Dugin, especially his daughter. But now it is clear that it was some kind of primitive FSB operation type“false flagIn addition, the publication highlights a number of details that can confirm this hypothesis. So, a photo of Nataliya Vovk with her husband Oleksandr, one of the organizers of the 2014 “referendum”, is circulating on social networks. for secession of Donetsk region from Ukraine.

Obviously, it can be denied that such opinions are expressed by Putin’s opponents. Thus, statements by the government in Kyiv denying responsibility for the attack should be taken with caution. But the scenario put forward by the FSB as plausible in George Damian’s long Facebook post, which has been widely circulated, should be interpreted in the same way. One reason, we’re told, is that Russian investigators have direct access to all the details of the case. Only if this is a false flag operation, this argument has no value.

In addition to arguments and counterarguments in favor of one or another of these scenarios, we must look at the murder in Moscow through the prism of two important aspects: 1. who is most useful, in the context of the war in Ukraine, of which Daria Dugin became a victim? 2. are there similar past events relevant from this point of view? In addition, it should also be noted that although Oleksandr Dugin is a figure known for his ultra-nationalist views, his influence on Vladimir Putin (some describe him as the new Rasputin, as “Putin’s brain”) and on the foreign policy of the Ruse Federation is often overestimated in the West. The fact that his views coincide with the ideological vision of some influential circles in Moscow, who dream of restoring the old tsarist empire and consider Russia to have a special civilizational role as a counterweight to the corrupt and decadent West, in no way means that he is the one who He knew them, but only that he was in sync with them.

In fact, Dugin did not bring anything original from this point of view, even if ideas like Russia stretching from Vladivostok to Dublin were expected to cause quite a stir in the West. The idea of ​​encouraging by any means the separation of the United States and Great Britain from the rest of Europe as an essential element in this effort is not necessarily original either. This has been abundantly clear since 2007, when at the annual security conference in Munich, Vladimir Putin openly talked about a new world order, even if no one in the West took it seriously at the time. As for the exceptional spiritual role that Russia should play in the Eurasian space, this is an idea that was formulated long ago, with various nuances, by the Russian Orthodox Christian philosophers Berdyaev, Solovyov, and especially Ivan Ilyin. The latter, an ardent anti-Bolshevik who died in exile in Switzerland in 1954, was a follower of a form of Christian authoritarianism that we find much of what we see in Moscow today. In 2014, the Kremlin leader personally ensured that Ilyin’s bones were delivered to the country, and later recommended his work, along with the works of Berdyaev and Solovyov, as mandatory reading for governors of Russian provinces.

Dugin was never really influential and had no direct connection to Putin, writes Mark Galeotti in The Spectator. At one point he enjoyed a period of glory, when his book “Fundamentals of Geopolitics” was presented as a training lecture at the Military Academy, he taught at Moscow State University and was often invited to appear on television. But in 2014, he fell into disgrace, being dismissed from the university at his request. It is true that he has some value as an agent of Moscow’s influence in far-right circles in the West and in Orthodox countries in the East, especially among a section of the Orthodox clergy.

For example, in Romania he met with monks from the Neamt Monastery, and in 2013 and 2014 he was in Bucharest, where he met with a number of famous political figures, including Adrian Nestase (at the headquarters of the Titulescu Foundation), with the cartoonist Eugene. Mihescu, a former UNESCO ambassador, or Celin Georgescu, was circulated for some time as a prime ministerial offer from the AUR (which, however, has since been withdrawn by George Simeon). In 2017, he presented in Bucharest a book translated by the former vice-prime minister from Chisinau, Yuri Roshka. But both in the West and in our country, the relatively favorable attitude towards Dugin, as well as among some of the Orthodox clergy, arose against the background of antipathy to progressive retreats in Western Europe and the USA, actively promoted in Brussels. and not as a show of sympathy for the project of expansion in the region of imperial Russia. This, with a high degree of probability, also explains the surprisingly high percentage, 21 percent, of Romanians who blame the start of the war in Ukraine on the trio of the EU, the United States and Ukraine – as shown by a recent market research commissioned by YouGov, a well-known UK polling center European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) while only 5 percent of Britons and 10 percent of Poles and Swedes saw responsibility in a similar way.

All these details are important when we try to understand the reasons that could have been behind the decision to kill Oleksandr Dugin (the theory is that Daria was not the target, but her father, who at the last moment decided to drive in another car). The first conclusion is that Dugin, and even more so his daughter, were in fact a person whom the Kremlin had no problem doing without if there were interests that were considered higher, but who were also infamous enough for their deaths to arouse national emotions and anti- Ukrainian discontent abroad, especially among those who sympathized with some ideas spread by Oleksandr Dugin.

In this context, a possible symbolic signal, something that they would demonstrate that they can strike even in Moscow, a possible reason why Kyiv could make such a decision, had many negative consequences, including a negative perception abroad (from this point of view, murder Daria, a 29-year-old woman, carries more emotional weight than her father’s murder) and growing domestic support for Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine, which has begun to wane ( British Daily Telegraph reports that a recent survey found a significant drop of more than 20 percent in the audience for Russian state television, Moscow’s main pro-war media vector). This is exactly what the Kremlin’s propaganda machine is trying to take advantage of. In a post on Facebook Earlier it was said that since Kyiv took responsibility for blowing up cars in which representatives of the authorities were in the territories of Ukraine occupied by Russian troops, why could we not see Daria Dugina as a victim of the explosion in a similar way? However, it is difficult to assume that the Kyiv authorities, who proved to be quite experienced and creative in the communication campaign, were not aware of the significant difference between the two situations in terms of perception in Russia and beyond.

On the other hand, in addition to the benefit of reviving Russian domestic support for the war, the assassination provides a good opportunity to increase repression against critics of Putin and opponents of military intervention in Ukraine. Literally a few hours after the attack, he notes The Moscow Timesbrutal attacks were unleashed on those who were called righteous “Iintelligence pro-UkrainianDirector of the RT channel Margarita Simonyan wrote about this in a post on the social network “All these deputies of municipal councils, bloggers, activists should be arrested. We need to get rid of all this garbage“. While the press secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Maria Zakharova, advocated the expansion of legal norms aimed at “informational violence“, which in translation means increased sanctions against everyone who does not adhere to the official point of view of the authorities regarding “military special operation” from Ukraine. This leads journalist Yuliya Latynina to wonder if we are witnessing something similar to the episode of the assassination of Sergei Kirov, which Stalin used in 1934 to launch his reign of terror. Read the full article and comment on Contributors.ro