Who is Alexander Dugin, aka 'Putin's brain', whose daughter was killed in a car blast?

 On Saturday, Daria Dugina, the daughter of influential Russian political theorist Alexander Dugin, was killed in a bombing on the outskirts of Moscow.

Authorities said the 29-year-old TV commentator was killed by an explosive planted in the SUV she was driving.

While no one has taken responsibility for the attack, authorities suspect the target was not Daria but her father Alexander.

The blast occurred while Daria was returning from a cultural festival she attended with Alexander. Russian media reports cited witnesses as saying the SUV belonged to Dugin and that he had decided at the last minute to travel in another vehicle.

Let’s take a closer look at the 60-year-old Dugin, the nationalist philosopher and writer known as ‘Putin’s brain’ and ‘Putin’s Rasputin’:

Early life and rise to prominence

As per The Guardian, Dugin was born into a high-ranking military family in 1962 and spent his childhood years as an anti-communist dissident.

During the final decades of the Soviet Union, Dugin joined a slew of eccentric avant-garde collectives and showed interest in the politics of Nazi Germany.

He gained notoriety writing for the far-right newspaper Den in the 1990s. It was in that newspaper that he expounded his anti-liberal and ultranationalist vision of Russia, which he said was destined to face off against an individualistic, materialistic West.

He and novelist Eduard Limonov later co-founded the National Bolshevik party, which was a blend of fascist and communist-nostalgic rhetoric and symbolism, as per the report.

His 1997 The Foundations of Geopolitics became a textbook in the Russian general staff academy and solidified his transition from a dissident to a prominent pillar of the conservative establishment, as per the report.

Foreign Policy magazine described that text as a “a pole star for a broad section of Russian hardliners”.

“Dugin’s main argument in Foundations came straight from (Karl) Haushofer’s pages: the need to thwart the conspiracy of ‘Atlanticism’ led by the United States and NATO and aimed at containing Russia…The plan was simple: first put the Soviet Union back together, counseled Dugin, and then use clever alliance diplomacy focused on partnerships with Japan, Iran, and Germany to eject the United States and its Atlanticist minions from the continent,” as per the Foreign Policy piece.

Dugin is a prominent proponent of the “Russian world” concept, a spiritual and political ideology that emphasizes traditional values, the restoration of Russia’s power and the unity of all ethnic Russians throughout the world.

Ukraine war

Dugin is a vehement supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s move sending troops into Ukraine.

As per BBC, Dugin’s works are said to have had a deep influence on Putin.

He is thought to be the chief architect of the ultra-nationalist ideology endorsed by many in the Kremlin.

While Dugin’s exact ties to Putin are unclear, the Kremlin frequently echoes rhetoric from his writings and appearances on Russian state TV.

He helped popularise the “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia” concept that Russia used to justify the 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and its support of separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine.

He promotes Russia as a country of piety, traditional values and authoritarian leadership, and disdains Western liberal values.

Dugin was put on a Western sanctions list after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, a move he also backed.

As per Indian Express, Dugin considers an independent Ukraine a “huge danger to all of Eurasia”, and that the total military and political control of the whole north coast of the Black Sea is an “absolute imperative” of Russian geopolitics.

As per The New York Times, Dugin has propounded the idea of Ukraine becoming “a purely administrative sector of the Russian centralized state”.

Bombing leads to back and forth

The car bombing, unusual for Moscow, is likely to aggravate tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

Denis Pushilin, president of the separatist Donetsk People’s Republic, the pro-Moscow region that is a focus of Russia’s fighting in Ukraine, blamed the blast on “terrorists of the Ukrainian regime, trying to kill Alexander Dugin.”

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, denied Ukrainian involvement, saying, “We are not a criminal state, unlike Russia, and definitely not a terrorist state.”

Political analyst Abbas Gallyamov, a former speechwriter for Putin, called the attack “an act of intimidation” aimed at Kremlin loyalists.

To them, he said, “this is a symbolic act, demonstrating that hostilities have been confidently transferred to the territory of Russia, which means that this is no longer an abstract war that you watch on TV,” he said. “This is already happening in Russia. Not only Crimea is being bombed, but terrorist attacks are already being carried out in the Moscow region.”

Daria expressed similar views as her father and had appeared as a commentator on the nationalist TV channel Tsargrad, where Dugin had served as chief editor.

Dugina was sanctioned by the United States in March for her work as chief editor of United World International, a website that the US described as a disinformation source. The sanctions announcement cited a United World article this year that contended Ukraine would “perish” if it were admitted to NATO.

In an appearance on Russian television just Thursday, Dugina said, “People in the West are living in a dream, in a dream given to them by global hegemony.” She called America “a zombie society” in which people opposed Russia but could not find it on a map.

Dugina, “like her father, has always been at the forefront of confrontation with the West,” Tsargrad said Sunday.

An unknown Russian group, the National Republican Army, claimed responsibility Sunday for the bombing, according to a former Russian lawmaker, Ilya Ponomarev.

The AP could not verify the existence of the group. Ponomarev, who left Russia after voting against its annexation of Crimea in 2014, made the statement to Ukrainian TV.

With inputs from agencies

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