That lethal tautology killed Daria Dugina. Although I seriously doubt Ukraine was responsible for that car bomb for many reasons (I suspect the resistance in Russia instead), I don’t really care. For me, any assassination of anyone in Putin’s far-right, fascist, and evil circle is completely justified, no matter who does it. It’s a justified killing and a most excellent win for good over evil.
What’s absurd are those who lament Daria’s assassination. “Oh no, she was an innocent victim. They were going after the father.” Maybe the last is true but not the first. But let’s be clear: Dear Daria was her father’s daughter. There was once a Colombian dictator, Rojas Pinilla, with a daughter who was more evil than he was. The Dugin-Dugina pair reminded me of them.
Yes, maybe Alexander Dugin, often called “Putin’s brain,” was the target, but Daria was right up there on the list. (Or, maybe Alexander’s alias means that many Russians don’t think that old Vladimir has a brain—he thought the Ukrainian war would end in a few days, the stupid moron.) Alexander, the far-right, fascist, and possible ideological mentor pushing for a return to Catherine the Great’s Russia (her painting was the only one left in an Odesa museum to show how little the Ukrainians think of that bitch) probably deserved to die more than his daughter, but she was no saint.
Dugina—the -a in Russian often indicates a female unmarried daughter, but, like in the US, maybe a woman in Russia can keep her maiden name?—was a propagandist (with emphasis on “was” because what happened to her gave her a taste of the hell that awaits her and where the father should end up as well). She echoed her father’s philosophy and promoted Putin’s imperial designs for the Rodina.
And that’s segue to the evil PR campaign now run by Russian state media, which Daria was a part of. Gone are the fake clips of supposed Ukrainian atrocities. Russia is losing the war, and even if they don’t, Putin has lost face. So, his new PR campaign creates a much larger enemy than Ukraine. In fact, if that campaign even mentions Ukraine, it considers that country as part of the greater enemy that the West represents for Mother Russia. It’s every two-bit dictator’s flailing battle cry where, in his last moments, he paints himself as the savior of his country: “Everyone is against us!” (A certain ex-president here in the US expresses similar sentiments.)
More evidence has come to light now that shows how desperate Putin has become. Russia’s internal security service, the FSB, took no time at all (a day and a half) to come up with a person-of-interest for the bombing. Is it possible that the FSB planned the bombing? They claim the POI was a Ukrainian woman who fled to Estonia. Imagine the possibilities for how Putin can use that lie! He can silence the far-right in Russia, represented by Dugin, extremists who think Putin isn’t enough of a fascist or imperialist, by using the bombing as an excuse to go after more innocent civilians in Ukraine and invade Estonia to kidnap or murder the POI as well. Apparently the US realizes the danger, because they’re telling Americans (as of Tuesday, August 23) to leave Ukraine; and, of course, Estonia is now a NATO country, so an attack on that country could lead to WWIII, or at least a major conflict involving NATO versus Russia.
There’s no obvious reason for Ukraine to have done the bombing. What could they possibly gain? Killing Putin, yes—the world applauds; but killing Papa Dugin, maybe the intended target, no, for the reasons just discussed. (He really needs his beard trimmed, though). Yet Putin’s crazy enough to have ordered his FSB to do the bombing. After all, he used Macchiavellian tricks to come to power when Yeltsin was president!
But is Putin that completely deranged? In any war with Europe and the US, Russia would lose and cease being a Third World country (what it is now—the Russian invaders of Ukraine admire the quality of like in Ukriane because they have none in their homeland) and return to the Dark Ages!
Putin is desperate enough, though, to look for a propaganda coup. That would be right out of Orwell’s 1984 and Goebbels’s playbook, but it would also be really dumb because of the risks just enumerated. Of course, Putin was such a dumb bastard that he thought that attacking Ukraine would break the West’s will and disrupt NATO. He got just the opposite. Russia is so hated on the world stage right now that Putin’s major motivation for the grain deal was to feed those starving people in nations that might still be friendly towards Russia (that’s where the first grain shipments are going, of course).
Yes, in any case, Russia has so few friends right now that not many in the world won’t mourn Daria Dugina at all, and a lot more will wish that Vladimir Putin had been the victim.