Darya Dugina death: ‘Anti-Putin Russian partisans’ planted car bomb

Russian resistance fighters were behind the car bombing that killed the daughter of an ultra-nationalist philosopher who had backed the invasion of Ukraine, a former Russian opposition MP has said.

Ilya Ponomarev, who fled to Ukraine after opposing the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, said a group of Russian partisan fighters known as the National Republican Army (NRA) had claimed responsibility for the bombing.

Darya Dugina, 29, was killed on Saturday night when her car exploded on a highway near Moscow. She had been with her father, Alexander Dugin, at an event shortly before the blast. It is believed that he was the intended target. Dugin, who has been called “Putin’s brain”, is widely seen as having influenced the Kremlin’s aggressive foreign policy.

Kremlin allies were quick to point the finger at “Ukrainian terrorists”, days after a series of explosions at an airfield in Russian-occupied Crimea were also attributed to Ukrainian saboteurs.

However, Ponomarev said the NRA fighters were responsible. He said the group had carried out about a dozen arson attacks on military recruitment centres across Russia.

“This act, like many other partisan actions carried out on the territory of Russia in recent months, was carried out by the NRA,” Ponomarev, 47, said during a broadcast by February Morning, his Kyiv-based media outlet. “This attack opens a new page in Russian resistance to Putinism. New — but not the last.”

He then read out a manifesto that he said he had been given by the NRA. “Our goal is to stop the destruction of Russia and its neighbours,” it read. “We will depose and destroy Putin! Long live Free Russia!”

The NRA also said it would target pro-Putin officials, Kremlin-linked businessmen and members of the army and the security services to “cleanse our motherland of filth”.

Ponomarev said he supported the NRA and defended the group’s right to launch violent attacks inside Russia.

“The war is a colossal crime,” he wrote on Telegram, the messaging app. “There are people who consider it right to punish the initiators of the war and its ideologists. They do what they think is right.”

It was impossible to verify Ponomarev’s claims about the existence of the NRA. However, his February Morning online channel, which was launched after the Kremlin ordered tanks into Ukraine, has previously called for violent resistance against Putin’s regime.

Its Rospartizan project on Telegram offers advice on how to produce improvised weapons and urges attacks on government buildings. “Non-violent methods never lead to the fall of such regimes,” Fedor Klimenko, the outlet’s editor, told The Times last month.

Pro-Kremlin figures accused Ponomarev, who has been a Ukrainian citizen since 2019, of seeking to cover up for Ukraine’s SBU security service, which they alleged was behind the car bombing. Vladimir Dzhabarov, the deputy head of the upper house’s foreign affairs committee, said Ponomarev’s claims of an underground resistance group were “nonsense”.

There were also calls for violent retribution against the former MP. Yevgeny Primakov, a Russian government official who heads an organisation that is responsible for Russians living abroad, called for a “competition for the best video or photo of Ponomarev crawling on broken legs and apologising, while spitting out his teeth.”

Although he holds no official government post, Dugin, a former professor at Moscow State University, has advocated an imperialist theory called Eurasianism, which calls on the Russian government to unite ethnic Russians and reject western, European values. His daughter was a journalist and political commentator with similar views, and both were sanctioned in the West over their support for the invasion of Ukraine.

Dugin arrived at the scene of the blast soon afterwards and was seen clutching his head in despair. He is believed to have been taken to hospital with heart problems.

The attack, which took place near an area of Moscow’s suburbs that is home to the Russian elite, will make the promoters of Kremlin propaganda extremely nervous, said Abbas Gallyamov, a political analyst.

“Many people today have suddenly realised that war is not some talk show. No, war is something very concrete and something that concerns you personally,” he wrote on Facebook. “The propaganda machine will start to lose momentum.”

Denis Pushilin, the pro-Kremlin leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the separatist region in eastern Ukraine, had earlier blamed Kyiv for the killing. He posted a photograph of Dugina online and wrote: “Vile scoundrels! The terrorists of the Ukrainian regime, trying to eliminate Alexander Dugin, blew up his daughter . . . in a car. Blessed memory of Darya, she is a real Russian girl!”

Moscow also joined speculation that Ukraine could be behind the bombing. Maria Zakharova, the chief spokeswoman at the Russian foreign ministry, said: “If a Ukrainian trace is confirmed — and that theory was raised by the head of the DNR Denis Pushilin, and it needs to checked by the competent [authorities] — then we are talking about state terrorism by the Kyiv regime.”

Kyiv denied involvement. An aide to President Zelensky said that Ukraine was “not a criminal state like Russia”.

Dugin had spent the early evening at a conservative “family” arts festival in a quiet village outside Moscow, where he gave a lecture entitled Tradition and History. He was about to get into his Toyota Land Cruiser with his daughter, when he decided to follow on behind in another vehicle instead — and handed her the keys to the Toyota.

Investigators said the bomb was placed on the bottom of the car, under the driver’s seat.

Dugin’s name was added to western sanctions lists for his support of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. His daughter was sanctioned by the US Treasury in March over an article on the United World International website claiming that Ukraine would “perish” if it were admitted to Nato. Britain sanctioned her last month as a “frequent and high-profile contributor of misinformation” on Ukraine.

In one of her last appearances on state television, Dugina called Ukrainian soldiers who were taken captive by Russia in Mariupol in April “non-humans.” She also said the war in Ukraine was a “battle of civilisations.”

With his flowing beard and swept-back hair, Alexander Dugin has the look of a prophet. A fluent English speaker with a strident tone, Dugin is one of the architects of Eurasianism, an imperialist ideology that stresses Russia’s special identity.

Analysts differ on the extent of his sway over President Putin, the 60-year-old philosopher’s idea that Russia should gather its historical lands, rebuff the philistine influence of the West and plough its own furrow is evident in Kremlin thinking.

To his mind, Ukraine is a cradle of Russian civilisation and Putin’s invasion an attempt to protect a way of life as a geopolitical thrust. The president himself has voiced the same theory.

So far, the Kremlin has managed to muffle bad news from the conflict, including the high number of Russian deaths. But signs of trouble are emerging that are harder to explain away.

Earlier this month, at least eight aircraft were destroyed in a series of blasts at an airfield in occupied Crimea, which was possibly the work of Ukrainian saboteurs (Kyiv hinted it was responsible). Frightened tourists fled the peninsula to mainland Russia.

That followed a series of mysterious fires at Russian military installations, factories and research institutes, especially in regions bordering Ukraine.

Darya Dugina’s death is being seen in a similar light. Is it part of a growing Ukrainian counter-campaign on Russian soil?

Moscow and its rebel allies in eastern Ukraine have already suggested Kyiv is behind the activist’s assassination.

An aide to President Zelensky denied Ukraine was involved, saying it was “not a criminal state like Russia”. But Ukrainian assassins may have taken the initiative without direction from above. That will trouble Moscow if it is seen as unable to defend its own territory and its citizens.