A Toyota Land Cruiser “exploded at full speed on a public road” and caught fire, he said, adding that the fire was likely caused by an “explosive device” installed in the vehicle. The driver, identified by the committee as “journalist and political scientist Daria Dugina”, died at the scene.
Dugina, 29, was allegedly driving her father’s car to a festival they both attended when the explosion happened, engulfing the car in flames, a friend of Dugin’s told state media Tass. Andrey Krasnov said he thought his father was under attack, “or maybe both”.
Dugin, an acerbic critic of the United States, closely linked to the Kremlin, is sometimes nicknamed “Putin’s Rasputin” or “Putin’s brain”. Although he does not hold an official government position, he has long called for Ukraine’s reintegration into Russia, and experts say his expansionist language and views on Russia’s place in the world have been echoed by the Kremlin and in Putin’s recent speeches.
His daughter also spoke publicly in favor of the war in Ukraine and Russian expansion. In March she was sanctioned by the United States as part of a list of Russian elites and disinformation outlets run by Russian intelligence, alongside her father who has been designated for sanctions since 2015. She has also been sanctioned by UK in July for his support of the Russian invasion.
“The car immediately caught fire [following the explosion]. She lost control, as she was driving at high speed, and flew across the road,” Krasnov told Russian state media, describing it as a “very serious event.”
Krasnov said Dugin, who left the festival in another vehicle, returned to the scene after the explosion. Videos circulating on social media appear to show a visibly distraught Dugin standing on a debris-strewn road, holding his head in his hands. The remains of a car were in flames on the side of the road.
The explosion occurred around 9 p.m. local time near the village of Bolshie Vyazyomy, southwest of Moscow, the committee said.
The Kremlin has yet to comment on the incident, which seemed poised to create a new flashpoint.
Denis Pushilin, a prominent separatist leader and key figure in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, immediately blamed Ukraine for Dugina’s death, without providing any evidence.
Ukrainian officials distanced themselves from the explosion and suggested it could be the result of an internal conflict within Russia. “We don’t even comment on this, because it’s not an interesting topic for Ukrainian special services,” Andrii Yusov, spokesman for Ukraine’s General Directorate of Military Intelligence, told The Washington Post on Sunday. Yusov added that Dugina was not someone Ukrainian military intelligence would “make official statements about.”
Yet Yusov noted that “I can say that the process of internal destruction of ‘Russky Mir’, or ‘the Russian world’, has begun” and predicted that “the Russian world will eat and devour itself from within” .
The UK Treasury Department described Dugina in its sanctions list as “a frequent and high-level contributor of misinformation regarding Ukraine and the Russian invasion of Ukraine on various online platforms”.
The US Treasury Department, after sanctioning Dugina, said she was the editor of a disinformation website called United World International, which had suggested Ukraine would ‘perish’ if admitted to the NATO. The website was developed by a Russian political influence operation called “Lakhta Projectwhich Treasury officials say has used fictitious online personas to interfere in US elections since at least 2014.
According to Treasury officials, Dugina’s father was first named in 2015 for “being responsible for or complicit in actions or policies that threaten the peace, security, stability, sovereignty or territorial integrity of Ukraine”.
Dugin was a leader of the Eurasian Youth Union, which actively recruited people with military and combat experience to fight on behalf of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, a separatist enclave in eastern Ukraine that has played a central role in Putin’s justification of the war.
In an interview with a Russian YouTuber in MarchDugina said that Ukrainian identity is mainly located in western Ukraine and that eastern Ukraine – including the Donbass region – was likely to accept a “Eurasian empire” on the basis of religious faith and nationality.