Russia has accused Ukraine’s intelligence services of carrying out the murder of Darya Dugina, the daughter of an ultra-nationalist Russian ideologue, raising fears of a violent retaliation.
Dugina was killed on Saturday evening when a bomb blew up the Toyota Land Cruiser she was driving, Russian investigators said.
The Guardian has not been able to verify the accusations made by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). The agency released video showing its suspect crossing the Russian border and entering a building it said belonged to the victim, but did not provide other photo or video evidence to corroborate the allegations.
If the accusation against Ukraine is true, it would mark a significant embarrassment for Russia’s security and counterintelligence apparatus, which failed to prevent the attack in an elite Moscow postcode and then let the suspects slip away.
A senior Ukrainian official repeated a denial of Kyiv’s involvement in the car bombing on Monday, arguing the victim and her father were not strategically significant figures. “What reason is there for us to do this?” said one, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The official said they believed Dugin was the target, not his daughter, but said he was not an important Russian political figure or a decision-maker in the Ukraine war. “Not many people here have heard of him, and nobody had heard of his daughter,” they added.
The FSB’s version indicates that Russia believed that Dugina was the primary target of the attack rather than her father, Alexander Dugin, as was previously believed. Dugin is a far better-known ultra-nationalist pundit who has called for violence against Ukrainians and denied the Ukrainian state’s right to exist.
In a statement on Monday, the FSB said its suspect was a female Ukrainian citizen who it said had arrived in Russia in late July with her 12-year-old daughter.
“It has been established that the crime was prepared and committed by the Ukrainian special services,” the FSB statement read, according to state-run RIA Novosti.
The woman allegedly moved into a flat near Dugina in order to surveil her, then attended the rightwing Tradition festival that Dugina attended on the night she was killed.
Five minutes after leaving the festival, the bomb ripped through her car.
The FSB said that after the killing, the woman and her daughter fled across the Russian border into Estonia. It said they had been traveling in a Mini Cooper that used various licence plates, including registrations from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Russian-controlled areas of east Ukraine.
Dugina was a prominent commentator, who in her final appearance on state TV last week accused the west of being a “zombie society” hell-bent on conflict with Russia. She claimed that the atrocities unearthed in Bucha were staged to blame Russia for war crimes.
Her death after a literary festival that attracted a conservative, pro-war crowd appeared to rattle some of Moscow’s political elite, many of whom believed they were protected from the violence that Russia had unleashed on Ukraine.
One attender, who assumed Ukraine stood behind the attack, wrote that the car-bombing could be the “first of more to come, friends”. Ksenia Sobchak, the daughter of Putin’s mentor Anatoly Sobchak who has presented herself as a political liberal, also expressed shock about Dugina’s death, writing she was “horrified”. “What do people’s children have to do with it?” she wrote.
Dugin, in his first public comments following the death of his daughter, wrote that the attack on her was an act of “bloody terror”. “Our hearts yearn not only for revenge or vengeance … we only need our victory,” he said. In a sign of official support, Vladimir Putin also called Dugina’s death a “vile, cruel crime”.
Russian hawks such as RT’s Margarita Simonyan have called for retaliatory strikes against Ukrainian officials, including the Ukraine security service headquarters, and Ukraine has already warned government officials to stay away from state buildings before its Independence Day celebrations this Wednesday.
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Overnight on Saturday, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, had warned that “Russia may try to do something particularly nasty, something particularly cruel” the following week as the country celebrates its 31st anniversary of independence.
A senior Ukrainian official said Kyiv expected Russia to try to make political capital from the incident, particularly because it has come at a time when Ukraine wants the US and other countries to list Moscow as a state sponsor of terrorism. Russia would likely refer to the bombing to try “to silence voices” calling for such a designation.
The brazen nature of the attack has raised questions about how Russian intelligence services could have allowed it to take place.
Christo Grozev, an open-source researcher who has worked closely with Bellingcat, noted the Ukrainian suspect’s name had been included in a leaked list of suspected fighters from the Azov battalion, which has been banned in Russia.
In a response, the Azov regiment said that it had no affiliation with the woman and that she “never belonged to our unit”. A person believed to be a relative of the woman denied that he knew her and declined to speak with the Guardian.
Still, it seems unlikely that the woman, whose name and picture was published by pro-Kremlin media within hours of the FSB announcement, could have entered Russia without raising any alarms.
Video published by Russian state media showed the woman driving a Mini Cooper with a racing stripe to border posts to enter Russia and then exit out to neighbouring Estonia, where she went into hiding after the attack took place, according to the unverified FSB allegations.
“If Estonia does not extradite the perpetrator of the murder of Dugina to Russia, there are grounds for harsh actions against Tallinn for harbouring a terrorist,” said Vladimir Dzhabarov, a senior member of the Russian Federation Council.
A spokesperson for the Estonian police and border guard said they would not comment on the movements of private individuals and had not received any request for information from the Russian authorities.
They said: “We can publish the data of people moving across the border only in the cases prescribed by law, and the situation where the Russian special service accuses them of something in the media is not one of them.”