On Sunday, Russian authorities said they had opened a murder investigation after the death of the daughter of the ultra-nationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin in a car bomb explosion on the outskirts of Moscow.
The Russian Investigative Committee said it believed someone planned and ordered the car bombing that killed Daria Dugina, based on evidence already gathered from the explosion.
"Taking into account the data already obtained, the investigation believes that the crime was pre-planned and was of an organized nature," the investigative committee said in a statement on Sunday.
Dugina was killed at the scene after "an explosive device, presumably installed in a Toyota Land Cruiser, exploded on a public road and the car caught fire" around 9:00 pm. Local time, Saturday, near the Polish village of Vyazimy, according to the press service of the Russian Investigative Committee, as reported by the Russian state news agency TASS.
Dugina's father is a Russian writer and theorist, who is credited with being the architect or "spiritual guide" of Russia's conquest of Ukraine. He is alleged to have a great influence on Russian President Vladimir Putin and has been described by Foreign Affairs magazine as "Putin's brain".
Dugin and his daughter were punished by the United States. She wrote that the United Kingdom imposed sanctions on Dogina in July for being "a frequent and high-profile contributor to disinformation regarding Ukraine and the Russian invasion of Ukraine on various online platforms".
Videos of the explosion showed a burning car on the side of the road and scattered car parts in the surrounding area. One of the unverified videos appears to show Dugin at the scene.
Dogina's friend told TASS that he thought Dougina's father was the real target of the explosion - or maybe both - because the car belonged to Alexander.
"It's her father's car," Krasnov told TASS. Andrei Krasnov, head of the social movement Russky Grizon (Russian Horizon) and a personal acquaintance of the Dugina family, told TASS: "Dasha (Daria) is driving another car, but today she drove, and Alexander went separately."
A Russian Foreign Ministry official indicated that Ukrainian state structures were responsible for the explosion, a claim denied by the Ukrainian authorities.
"If the Ukrainian tracking is confirmed ... then we should talk about the policy of state terrorism implemented by the Kyiv regime," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a Telegram post.
"There are a lot of facts that have accumulated over the years: from political calls for violence to the leadership and participation of Ukrainian state structures in crimes," she said.
Ukraine on Sunday strongly denied any involvement in the car explosion. "Ukraine certainly has nothing to do with this because we are not a criminal state, as in the Russian Federation, and even more so, we are not a terrorist state," said Mikhailo Podolyak, adviser to the head of the office of the President of the Russian Federation. Ukraine, he said in a Ukrainian television interview.
"The flames engulfed her completely''
Krasnov told TASS that when "Dugina turned around on the Mozhaiskoye highway near the village of Bolshiye Vyazemi, an explosion occurred, and the car immediately caught fire."
"The fire completely engulfed her. She lost control because she was driving at high speed and headed to the other side of the road," added Krasnov, as quoted by TASS.
Meanwhile, forensic experts, investigators and explosives engineering experts are searching the place.
Daughter Dogina was born in 1992 and studied philosophy at Moscow State University, according to TASS.
In March 2022, the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Dogina for contributing to an article on the United World International (UWI) website suggesting that Ukraine would be "perished" if accepted into NATO. Dugina was UWI's editor-in-chief.
In a recent interview with Russia's 1RNK news channel, she claimed that the atrocities that occurred during the Russian occupation of the Ukrainian city of Bucha were American propaganda, chosen because of its phonetic similarity to the word "butcher," a word that associates it with the United States. President Joe Biden called Putin a "butcher" on March 29.
CNN visited the Bucha mass grave theater in April after Russian forces withdrew, and revealed to the world the horrors of their occupation. Pictures of corpses scattered in the streets of Bucha sparked international condemnation and investigations into possible Russian war crimes. Numerous eyewitnesses and videos linked many atrocities to Russian soldiers.
Her father was also sanctioned by the United States in 2015 for being responsible or complicit in actions or policies that threaten the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine.
The US Treasury also said that Alexander Dugin was a leader of the Eurasian Youth Union, which actively recruited individuals with military and combat experience to fight on behalf of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, and stated that it had a secret presence in Ukraine.
In an interview with CNN in 2017, Dugin noted the many similarities between his ideas and those of former US President Donald Trump. He described Trump's inaugural address as "as if I were going to write it myself."
He also said that Putin provided inspiration for Trump, "sort of ... an example to challenge the status quo, to challenge conventional wisdom, to challenge all these totalitarian principles of globalization and ultra-liberalism."