Western press is spinning the particular August 20 car bombing of Darya Dugina, the daughter of “Eurasionist” ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, being an attack on Vladimir Putin’s “ spiritual guide ” (CNN) and “ mind ” (Foreign Affairs) – implicitly a violent whack against the Putin routine.
That suits the longstanding and long-discredited view advertised by Western chancelleries that the Russian chief executive won’t survive the particular Ukraine war because of growing domestic resistance.
This self-serving reading of the murder—repeatedly endlessly in the English-language media– doesn’t square with the known information or best-practice inference. Although information remains fragmentary, what we can say for certain makes clear the origin and intent of the Dugina assassination must be sought elsewhere.
What we know, or can infer with a high degree of certainty, is the following:
- Aleksandr Dugin is not a Putin ally, but the strident critic associated with Putin’s stance toward the West.
- Dugin himself was the target of the assassination, not their daughter; the young woman acquired the misfortune to drive her father’s vehicle after a speaking event in Moscow whilst her father rode in a different automobile.
- The particular bombing was amateurish, the work of either terror cells or ordinary criminals, based on sources with knowledge of the thinking of Russian security services. The Russian state understands how to eliminate undesirables, and they do so in more efficient ways—and usually do not miss. “If Putin wanted to kill Dugin, ” said a single analyst familiar with state security methods, “it would have been completed differently, and for sure. ”
- It is unlikely within the extreme that the Ukraine government carried out the particular bombing, as a speaker for the Russian Foreign Ministry speculated.
Eliminate the extremely hard, as Sherlock Holmes said, and what remains, however improbable, must be true. Russian opponents of Putin—such as they are—had no reason to kill a messianic ideologue who had become an annoyance towards the Russian leader.
Putin may have had a reason to remove Dugin, but the bungled operation is the majority of uncharacteristic of condition security. If criminals were involved, the contract on Dugin could have been ordered all over the world.
To replicate, Dugin was not the Putin ally – quite the contrary. He was fired from his training job at Moscow University in 2014, an action that required Putin’s sign-on. Although Dugin supported what the Russian state calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine, he vituperated against Putin’s group of advisers.
In his latest Telegram and blog posts went out with August 20, just before the death of his daughter, Dugin declared that the “status quo regime” in Moscow—Putin’s present cabinet—won’t last six months which Russia would go through an apocalyptic alteration. Dugin’s statements edge on a call for routine change against Putin.
“The SMO [Special Military Operation] has changed everything, ” Dugin wrote. “The query is no longer whether the authorities wants to change or not. … Such changes simply are usually inevitable. Even if you combat to the death against their coming, they can not be delayed by more than six months. And then they will come in any case, ” Dugin submitted on Telegram.
He added: “With the beginning of the Unique Military Operation, the regime of history alone changed irreversibly: a brand new ontological vector appeared that cannot be dissolved by arbitrariness or decree. The enormous forces of history have come into play, the particular tectonic plates have shifted. Let the old program bury its deceased. A new Russian period is coming. Relentlessly. [Translation by Asia Times; emphasis added].
In the blog post the same day, Dugin declared, “The Special Military Operation as a philosophical phenomenon marks the particular return of the Empire–the return of The ussr to Empire, the entire restoration of our messianic future destiny. … We are the Orthodox bearers of the Eurasian Empire of the Finish. ”
Dugin refers to the Messianic Russian claim that after the fall of Ancient rome and Byzantium, Moscow, as a Third Ancient rome, is the last bastion of civilization.
The Putin whom proposed the Minsk II compromise in Ukraine—autonomy for the Russian-speaking regions within a sovereign Ukraine—is worlds apart from the ideologue who prophesizes a Russian-centered End Times.
The impossible (or nearly impossible) options to eliminate are:
- A hit by Russian state safety services at the behest of Putin. Although Putin disliked Dugin, he had no cause to kill him, and if he had needed Dugin dead, Dugin (and not their daughter) would be dead;
- Popular by Russian resistance elements with the intent of hurting Putin. As noted, Dugin was an irritation to Putin, not a help; and
- An operation on Russian soil with a foreign intelligence company; the United States, Britain, or even Ukraine almost certainly are deprived of such capabilities on a lawn in Russia.
By procedure for elimination, we are remaining with two achievable groups of perpetrators, namely Russian organized criminal offense or terrorist elements. Islamist terrorists have got conducted attacks within Moscow, but it will be improbable in the severe that they would select Dugin as a focus on.
Dugin includes a positive view associated with Islamist opposition to American hegemony, and attacked Putin’s harsh suppression of Chechnyan Islamists, who he viewed as a manifestation of traditional society’s opposition to globalism.
If we scratch terrorists off the list, the last outstanding item is Ruskies organized crime, probably with connections in order to Russian oligarchs overseas. Russian criminals do not have reason to undertake politics assassinations, risking the unwanted attention from the security services.
The obvious inference is that if criminals perpetrated the botched attempt on Aleksandr Dugin, they did therefore at the behest more, presumably oligarchs citizen abroad but with continuing connections to legal elements inside Russian federation.
Where oligarchs are living, where their property is located and where they may be subject to official stress are the questions in order to ask in order to take the chain of inference closer to the origin of the order to kill Aleksandr Dugin.
Follow David L. Goldman on Twitter at @davidpgoldman and Uwe Parpart at @uwe_parpart