On the assassination of Darya Dugina
This post is not a tribute to the departed individual and therefore some of the rules which I normally apply to obit posts - particularly, the absolute ban on comments critical of the person who has died - will not be applied.
However, we are still referring to the death of a human being and I would therefore ask that any comments made in response to this post are kept in good taste.
A few days ago, in the context of the attempted assassination of Sir Salman Rushdie, I quoted Noam Chomsky -
To avoid any possibility of misunderstanding, I prefixed the quote as follows:
"Yes, the quote below is posted in response to the assassination attempt against Sir Salman Rushdie, and no, I am not implying that I despise him.
The point I am making is that he would still have had the right to publish his books, and it would still have been a great wrong to try to assassinate him for doing so, even if I did despise him."
Ironically, a few days after I posted this, a commentator whose views all decent people should despise was assassinated, apparently by a bomb meant for her father whose views are equally contemptible.
In the early stages of the Moscow-backed uprising in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Russian ultra-nationalist Aleksandr Dugin told Russian state television that “Ukrainians need to be killed, killed, killed.” He went on to back Putin's illegal invasion this year, as did his daughter Darya who has now been assassinated.
I stand by what I wrote in the context of the attack on Salman Rushdie - it is always wrong to try to murder someone for their beliefs. Whoever was really behind the assassination of Darya Dugina, and whether the bomb was meant to kill her, or her father Aleksandr Dugin, or both, it was still murder and was still wrong.
I do not, however, believe there is any credibility at all in the Russian FSB's claim that the assassination was carried out by a Ukrainian agent. It is the Russian government, not the Ukrainian one, which has a track record for murdering people.
"The FSB, however, does not have a reputation for solving political killings quickly or telling the truth.
The murders and attempted murders of prominent Kremlin opponents have remained unsolved or only partially resolved even after decades. No investigation was even opened into the near-fatal poisoning of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny in August 2020.
But Dugina’s case was supposedly cracked in less than 36 hours."
I would not be in the least surprised if this was a "false flag" operation by the Kremlin or a sign of a power struggle within the Russian elite - a view put forward by people who know far more about Russian politics than I would claim to.
Andrei Piontkovsky, a political analyst and Kremlin critic, called the murder of Dugina a “warning” by the Russian security services to her father for his criticism of Putin.
Piontkovsky described the FSB claim that a Ukrainian agent killed Dugina as “monstrous in its self-revealing stupidity.”
Responsibility for the assassination was claimed by a little-known Russian dissident group calling itself the National Republican Army or NRA. This claim was assessed by one distinguished academic Kremlin-watcher and described using the technical term, "dodgy."
Most observers seem to regard the possibility that the NRA really did carry out the murder as an unlikely but real possibility - less likely than that it was a Russian state operation or part of a power struggle within the Russian elite, but more credible than the Russian claim that the Ukrainians were responsible.
Sadly it appears likely that the murder will only strengthen the fanaticism of those within the Russian state, including Dugin, who think that the problem with Vladimir Putin is that he's a soggy liberal.
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