Murder in Moscow: The murky politics behind a political killing

The funeral in Moscow Tuesday for Daria Dugina, the right-wing, pro-war activist who was killed in a car bombing Saturday, attracted hundreds of grim-faced mourners.

Yet it seemed almost palpably overshadowed by anxieties over the course of Russia’s 6-month-old war in Ukraine and the public’s staying power as the costs continue to mount.

There seems little doubt that the slaying of Ms. Dugina was in some manner fallout from the war, though there are several divergent theories over who planted the car bomb that killed her and why.

She was a prominent publicist and TV personality in her own right, and recently an enthusiastic promoter of the war. But the true target was more likely her father, ultranationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, a fringe figure on Russia’s political right and a sometime critic of President Vladimir Putin. Mr. Dugin was meant to be in the car with his daughter that night, but changed his mind at the last moment.

Mr. Dugin is the author of the “Eurasianist” ideology, which offers a rationale for the reconstitution of the Russian Empire by gathering together the Russian-speaking lands of Europe and Asia, and at their core, Russia, to create a superpower capable of challenging the West. The congruence between his philosophy and the course of events in recent years led many observers in the West to assume he must have a strong connection with Mr. Putin – even acting as his ideological guide – which perhaps explains the massive coverage his daughter’s assassination has received in Western media.

Experts say that’s probably why the Dugins were targeted by whoever it was, to create a major stir by hitting a target viewed by many not only as a vocal war advocate but also as a proxy for the Kremlin.

Ironically, there was never much evidence for a link between Mr. Dugin and the Kremlin, and Mr. Dugin himself denied it. The fact that he and his daughter were without any security protection that night would seem to confirm that.

“Dugin is a symbolic figure, but that’s likely why someone chose him as a target,” says Nikolai Petrov, a Russian affairs expert with Chatham House in London. “He was actually much better known in the West than he was in Russia.”

Russia’s FSB security service blamed a Ukrainian agent for the killing of Ms. Dugina, naming the suspect and detailing her movements with remarkable speed and precision, considering how slow the agency has been in the past to solve many other high-profile political killings. Russian media, running with this explanation, suggest Kyiv’s motive was to eliminate an ideological opponent and compensate for the lack of Ukrainian battlefield progress with a spectacular attack on Russian soil.

Ukraine denies any involvement. Some suggest an FSB “false flag” attack, aimed at rallying pro-war support and justifying an escalation of war against Ukraine. Former Russian parliamentarian Ilya Ponomarev, now in exile in Kyiv, created a stir by claiming that the hit was carried out by an indigenous Russian anti-Kremlin partisan group, “the National Republican Army.”

“I would take all these explanations being offered with a lot of skepticism,” says Dr. Petrov. “They all seem badly flawed. They are tailored mainly to be ammunition in the information war that’s going on, rather than honest attempts to inform people.”

If the goal of the attack was to shock the Russian public, to bring the war home in new ways, it probably won’t have much effect, analysts say. While casualty figures are a strictly protected state secret, and unofficial estimates are wildly divergent, Russians have not been shielded from images of the massive destruction taking place next door in Ukraine, yet polls continue to show at least tepid majority support for the war.

As a consequence, the killing of Ms. Dugina seems unlikely to have much impact among ordinary Russians, who barely knew the names of her or Mr. Dugin. For Russia’s elites, driven more by practical concerns than ideology, Dr. Petrov says, opinion has consolidated behind Mr. Putin since the war began, and there seems little likelihood of that changing.

“It is unlikely to affect public opinion,” says Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It will boost incentive for those who are fiercely pro-Putin, and those who are against dissent, to intensify the wave of hatred against internal enemies and Ukraine. Maybe it can serve as a pretext for increased repression.”

More likely to impact public opinion is the wave of Ukrainian attacks on airfields and ammunition depots far behind the lines, which have been extensively covered in the Russian media, says Dr. Petrov. Scenes of crowded beaches in Crimea, with people watching nearby explosions, he says, will probably rivet the attention of average Russians more than Ms. Dugina’s death.