The Russian authorities said on Sunday that a car bomb killed the adult daughter of a prominent Russian ultranationalist whose writings helped lay the ideological foundation for President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The authorities said they had opened a murder investigation into the death of the woman, Daria Dugina, after a Toyota Land Cruiser exploded on a highway 20 miles west of Moscow and burst into flames, scattering pieces across the road. State news media identified her as the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin, an outspoken supporter of Russia’s war in Ukraine, whose car she was driving.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the incident. Russian news media said that associates of Mr. Dugin believed that he, not his daughter, was the target.
A Ukrainian official disavowed his country’s involvement. But pro-Kremlin commentators and politicians quickly blamed Ukraine and demanded revenge, injecting new uncertainty into a war that has lasted nearly six months.
Russian investigators said that an explosive device had been planted underneath the car on the driver’s side and that the attack was believed to have been “a premeditated crime.”
Mr. Dugin is a self-educated political philosopher frequently described as “Putin’s brain,” although the actual relationship between the two men is opaque and, some experts on the Kremlin say, often overstated. But Mr. Dugin has long been one of the most visible proponents of the idea of an imperial Russia at the helm of a “Eurasian” civilization locked in an existential conflict in the West.
Ms. Dugina, 29, was a journalist and commentator who shared the hawkish worldview of her father and had been placed under sanctions by the U.S. and British governments for spreading disinformation about Ukraine.
Russia’s Investigative Committee — the country’s version of the F.B.I. — said in a statement that Ms. Dugina had died at the scene of the blast in the Odintsovo district, an affluent area of Moscow’s suburbs. Images and videos circulating on Russian social media showed a vehicle engulfed in flames and a man who appeared to be Mr. Dugin pacing back and forth, holding his hands to his head. These images could not be immediately verified.
Zakhar Prilepin, a popular conservative writer, said in a post on his Telegram channel that Mr. Dugin and his daughter were at a nationalist festival on Saturday but had left in different cars. Russian state media described the festival as a relatively low-security event. The state-run news agency Tass cited an unnamed law-enforcement source as saying that there were no security checks at the entrance to the parking lot where the car driven by Ms. Dugina had been parked.
The incident came as the Kremlin faces intensifying questions over its war effort in Ukraine and why it is not doing more to prevent attacks deep behind the front lines. Prominent supporters of the war — already angry over recent Ukrainian sabotage attacks in Crimea — quickly took to social media with claims that Ukraine was behind Ms. Dugina’s death.
“Ukraine certainly had nothing to do with yesterday’s explosion,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, said in televised comments on Sunday morning. “We are not a criminal state like the Russian Federation, much less a terrorist one.”
Denis Pushilin, the head of Russia-backed separatists in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, wrote on the Telegram social network that the “terrorists of the Ukrainian regime” were behind the car bombing.
The Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria V. Zakharova, stopped short of accusing Ukraine. But she wrote on Telegram that if Ukraine was indeed responsible, “then we have to be talking about a policy of state terrorism being realized by the Kyiv regime.”
“We are waiting for the results of the investigation,” she wrote.
While it remained unclear how or if Mr. Putin would respond to Ms. Dugina’s death, the calls for vengeance underscored how the Ukrainian invasion’s most fervent supporters could still become inconvenient allies for the Kremlin — especially if the Russian leader seeks to avoid an escalation of the war.
“For the Kremlin, any ideologized people can be both useful and dangerous,” said Marat Guelman, a Russian political expert now based in Montenegro who advised the Kremlin in the early years of Mr. Putin’s rule. “Right now, they are useful. But soon they will become dangerous.”
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Ukraine War News: Blast Kills Daughter of Putin Ally; Russia Opens Murder Investigation - The New York Times
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